Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the presidency, a decision that had sent shock waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy. Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas. Zaphod”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“...any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

“I’m not altogether sure. Let’s be straight here. If we find something we can’t understand we like to call it something you can’t understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don’t, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have that. “No, first we have to call it something which says it’s ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it’s not what you said it is, but something we say it is.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Having had this thought I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“In his dream he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new life forms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Una de las cosas que a Ford Prefect le había costado más trabajo entender de los humanos era su costumbre de repetir y manifestar continuamente lo que era a todas luces muy evidente;
como “Hace buen día”, ”Es usted muy alto” o “¡Válgame Dios!, parece que te has caído a un pozo de treinta metros de profundidad, ¿estás bien?”. Al principio, Ford elaboró una teoría para explicarse esa conducta extraña. Si los seres humanos no dejan de hacer ejercicio con los labios, pensó, es probable que la boca se les quede agarrotada. Tras unos meses de meditación y observación, rechazó aquella teoría a favor de una nueva: si no continúan haciendo ejercicio con los labios, pensó, su cerebro empieza a funcionar.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Zaphod sighed a “what is the world coming to” sort of sigh to absolve himself from all blame, and swung himself around in his seat. “Ship?” he called. “Yup?” said the ship. “Do what I do.” The ship thought about this for a few milliseconds and then, after double checking all the seals on its heavy duty bulkheads, it began slowly, inexorably, in the hazy blaze of its lights, to sink to the lowest depths.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any pan of the ship. They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was actually very likely to happen almost immediately. The starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laserlit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Hexagonal Phase: And Another Thing...

“The Norse God of Thunder looked at her awkwardly. He had to remove his great horned helmet because it was banging against the ceiling and leaving scratch marks in the plaster.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Mr. Beeblebrox, sir,” said the insect in awed wonder, “you’re so weird you should be in movies.” “Yeah,” said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing, “and you, baby, should be in real life.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“He had the perfect idea for explaining away every inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled as he pushed open the door which had so daunted him last night. “Arthur!!!!” He grinned cheerfully at the boggling eyes that stared at him from all corners of the pub, and told them all what a wonderful time he’d had in Southern California.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Is there any tea on this spaceship?”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“How far did we just travel?" he said.

"About ..." said Slartibartfast, "about two thirds of the way across the Galactic disc, I would say, roughly. Yes, roughly two thirds, I think."

"It's a strange thing," said Arthur quietly, "that the further and faster one travels across the Universe, the more one's position in it seems to be largely immaterial, and one is filled with a profound, or rather emptied of a ..."

"Yes, very strange," said Ford.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“monkey. I went along for the ride because I’d got some very safe money on him not doing it, and didn’t want him coming back with fake evidence.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This must be Thursday, I could never get the hang of Thursdays.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts

“Bir şeyi görmen onun orada olduğu anlamına gelmez. Aynı şekilde bir şeyi görmemen de onun orada olmadığı anlamına gelmez. Her şey algılarının senin dikkatini nereye yönelttiğine bağlıdır.”
― Douglas Adams, Otostopçu'nun Galaksi Rehberi

“Nunca renunció formalmente. Una mañana se limitó a salir tarde de su despacho y no ha vuelto.
Aunque ya ha transcurrido más de un siglo, muchos miembros del personal de la Guía siguen conservando la idea romántica de que sólo ha salido a tomar un croissant de jamón, y que volverá a cumplir una tarde de trabajo continuado.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“For a moment or two the old man didn’t reply. He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head whilst his house is burning down.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“There was a terrible ghastly silence. There was a terrible ghastly noise. There was a terrible ghastly silence. The”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Anyone who even notices, let alone calls attention to the curious, but utterly coincidental and meaningless fact that every world on which the Guide has ever set up an accounting department has shortly afterward perished in warfare or some natural disaster, is liable to get sued to smithereens.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Trilogy

“it is a well-known fact that those people who most 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. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact we weren’t. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother,”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. 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. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem. And”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If you’d call it a robot,” muttered Arthur. “It’s more a sort of electronic sulking machine.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“he had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of ‘Zen’ navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul

“but I 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