Douglas Adams > Quotes

“You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“How can you tell there's anything out there?" said the man politely. "The door's closed."

"But you know there's a whole Universe out there!" cried Zarniwoop. "You can't dodge your responsibilities by saying they don't exist!"

The ruler of the Universe thought for a long while while Zarniwoop quivered with anger.

"You're very sure of your facts," he said at last. "I couldn't trust the thinking of a man who takes the Universe - if there is one - for granted."

Zarniwoop still quivered, but was silent.

"I only decide about my Universe," continued the man quietly. "My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay."

"But don't you believe in anything?"

The man shrugged and picked up his cat. "I don't understand what you mean," he said.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“There you are, Arthur,” said Ford with the air of someone reaching the conclusion of his argument, “you think you’ve got problems.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Yes but, Arthur, that's ridiculous. People think that if you just say 'hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will just go away.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he frowned and said, “Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check.
“I went to the ship’s medical bay and plugged myself into the encephalographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads—all the tests I had to go through under Government medical officers before my nomination for presidency could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn’t have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I tried superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I’d given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?”
Ford nodded.
“And there it was,” said Zaphod, “clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatized those two lumps of cerebellum.”
Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white.
“Somebody did that to you?” whispered Ford.
“Yeah.”
“But have you any idea who? Or why?”
“Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was.”
“You know? How do you know?”
“Because they left their initials burned into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see.”
Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl.
“Initials? Burned into your brain?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what were they, for God’s sake?”
Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he looked away.
“Z.B.,” he said quietly.
At that moment a steel shutter slammed down behind them and gas started to pour into the chamber.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” choked Zaphod as all three passed out.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him—everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it. Having a conceited ego is one thing. Actually being told by a machine is another.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder.*”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“More of the planet was unfolding beneath them as the Heart of Gold streaked along its orbital path. The suns now stood high in the black sky, the pyrotechnics of dawn were over, and the surface of the planet appeared bleak and forbidding in the common light of day—gray dusty and only dimly contoured. It looked dead and cold as a crypt. From time to time promising features would appear on the distant horizon—ravines, maybe mountains, maybe even cities—but as they approached the lines would soften and blur into anonymity and nothing would transpire. The planet’s surface was blurred by time, by the slow movement of the thin stagnant air that had crept across it for century upon century.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.”
― Douglas Adams

“This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong. This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Look, don't you understand?" shouted Arthur. He pointed at Prosser. "That man wants to knock my house down!" Ford glanced at him, puzzled. "Well he can do it while you're away, can't he?" he asked. "But I don't want him to!" "Ah.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It’s very simple,” said Ford, “my client, Mr. Dent, says that he will stop lying here in the mud on the sole condition that you come and take over from him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Duty Free shops which are able to charge much lower prices than ordinary shops but - mysteriously - don't,”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“I think it’s even worse when you’re in a situation where the object of your desire is being nice to you and liking you, but that’s not enough, they’ve got to hate you or love you; anything in between is really upsetting and Arthur finds that very, very difficult. And”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“How can I tell,” said the man, “that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Now—either you all give yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two others we noticed on our way out here!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He didn’t look like an old hippie. Of course, you never could tell. His own elder brother had once spent a couple of years living in a Druidic commune, eating LSD doughnuts, and thinking he was a tree, since when he had gone on to become a director of a merchant bank.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Yes,” called out the sort of people who call out “yes” when comedians ask them if they’re having a wonderful time.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Just says prepaid ticket for Mr. Dirk Gently to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be collected. Were you not expecting to go to Albuquerque today, sir?”

“I was expecting to end up somewhere I didn’t expect, I just wasn’t expecting it to be Albuquerque, that’s all.”

“Sounds like it’s an excellent destination for you, Mr. Gently. Enjoy your flight.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,' continued Marvin.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, “Oh, hi, Ed! Nice tan. How’s Carol?” involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Asking people about their opinions is a very good way of making friends. Telling them about your own opinions can also work, but not always quite as well. Nowadays”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“Mr. Prosser said, “You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It’s quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a hen. Like most things, of course, it isn’t quite that simple.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

“always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. “Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? “No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency