Quotes from Douglas Adams

if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in the destruction of the planet Earth.

The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system. Arthur

If you wanted quick sex or a dirty fix or, God help you, a hamburger, that was where you went to get it. Here

The ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything is: 42

You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool.

A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment.

It is said that there is nothing surprising about the notion of, for instance, a person suddenly thinking about someone they haven't thought about for years, and then discovering the next day that the person has in fact just died.

Never mind," said Ford. "Rome wasn't burned in a day.

I did better than that. I called in a neighbour's kid who used to be able to solve Rubik's cube in seventeen seconds. He sat on a step and stared at it for over an hour before pronouncing it irrevocably stuck.

And thirdly," he said, "thirdly a party of Young Conservatives from Sirius B, are they here?" A party of smartly dressed young dogs stopped throwing rolls at each other and started throwing rolls at the stage. They yapped and barked unintelligibly.

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

He had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did.

Plenty of people didn't care for him much, but there is a huge difference between disliking somebody - maybe even disliking them a lot - and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.

He hadn't realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers for the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until it now said something it had never said to him before, which was yes.

Sensational new breakthrough in Improbability Physics. As soon as the ship's drive reaches Infinite Improbability it passes through every point in the Universe. Be the envy of other major governments.' Wow, this is big league stuff." Ford hunted excitedly through the technical specs of the ship, occasionally gasping with astonishment at what he read— clearly Galactic astrotechnology had moved ahead during the years of his exile.

I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe. Have you met Thor? He makes thunder.

According to the legends," he said, "the Magratheans lived most of their lives underground." "Why's that?" said Arthur. "Did the surface become too polluted or overpopulated?" "No, I don't think so," said Zaphod. "I think they just didn't like it very much.

Madagascar had been a monkey-free refuge for the lemurs off the coast of mainland Africa, and now Nosy Mangabé had to be a monkey-free refuge off the coast of mainland Madagascar. The refuges were getting smaller and smaller, and the monkeys were already here on this one, sitting making notes about it. "The difference," said Mark, "is that the first monkey-free refuge was set up by chance. The second was actually set up by the monkeys.

Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow.

Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn't like it, it is it. Trying to work out all the implications of this is as difficult as it was for early filmmakers to work out all the implications of being able to move the camera.

We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It

She worked out once and for all where the Land Rover had to be, and worked it out with such ruthless determination that the Land Rover would hardly dare not to be there