Quotes from Douglas Adams

All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was. No, said the old man, that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.

Ford! he said, there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it? Ford: We're safe. Arthur: Oh good. Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. Arthur: Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of.

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple. Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that.

What's so unpleasant about being drunk? Ask a glass of water!

Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was. Is there any tea on this spaceship? he asked.

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.

I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.

My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn't Have A Good Answer To.

A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.

The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.