Quotes from Douglas Adams

Marvin started his ironical humming again. Zaphod hit him and he shut up.

he found the idea of someone who was not only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because he thought the world didn't really understand the problems of privileged people, deeply obnoxious.

Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he'd had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.

You know,' he said, sitting back, reflectively, 'it's at times like this that you kind of wonder if it's worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that's been bugging me.

He was clearly a man of many qualities, even if they were mostly bad ones.

Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn't—or wasn't—a word for it, everyone thinks it's something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is "woking.

Earth: mostly harmless

I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it

Charming man, he said. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one...

My capacity for happiness,' he added, 'you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." Excerpt From: Adams, Douglas. "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Random House Publishing Group, 2010-09-29. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.

Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time.

Fifteen seconds later he left the house, five hours late but moving fast.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Time blossomed, matter shrank away. The highest prime number coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away for ever.

Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

Ford was beginning to behave rather strangely, or rather not actually beginning to behave strangely but beginning to behave in a way that was strangely different from the other strange ways in which he more regularly behaved.

Every single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some doors and closes many others. Most of them we don't notice. Some we do.

In the stillness, a fly would not have dared clear it's throat.

That's right … we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty

They live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief

I was feeling pretty raw about my own species because we presume to draw a distinction between what we call good and what we call evil. We find our images of what we call evil in things outside ourselves, in creatures that know nothing of such matters, so that we can feel revolted by them, and, by contrast, good about ourselves.