Douglas Adams Quotes

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

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.

It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere.

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.

"On the wall was a Duran Duran poster on which someone had scrawled in fat red felt tip, "Take this down please."
Beneath that another hand had scrawled, "No."
Beneath that again the first hand had written, ""I insist that you take it down."
Beneath that the second hand had written, "Won't!"
Beneath that - "You're fired."
Beneath that - "Good!"
And there the matter appeared to have rested.

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.

If you don’t open that exit hatch this moment I shall zap straight off to your major data banks and reprogram you with a very large axe, got that?

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

For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two — and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet — especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth.

It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me,” said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, “Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?

# Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

# Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

# Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.