Douglas Adams > Quotes

“He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. You also panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“He put some more cold pizza into his face.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I guess when the novel started, most early novels were just sort of pornography: Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 millions miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
― Douglas Adams

“I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so—but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.”
― The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”
― Douglas Adams

“Oradan sekiz saat uzakta, batıda, bir adam kumsalda oturmuş, anlatılmaz kaybı için yas tutuyordu. Kaybının yasını ancak küçük keder paketleri halinde tutabiliyordu, çünkü tamamı, taşınması çok zor kocaman bir yük oluşturuyordu.”
― Douglas Adams

“It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Como sair do planeta 1. Ligue para a NASA. O telefone deles é (1-202) 358-0001. Explique que é muito importante você sair o mais rápido possível. 2. Se eles não colaborarem, ligue para qualquer amigo que você tiver na Casa Branca – (1-202) 456-2121 – para pedir que quebrem seu galho com o pessoal da NASA. 3. Se você não tiver nenhum amigo na Casa Branca, ligue para o Kremlin (dê para a telefonista o número 7495 697-03-49). Eles também não têm nenhum amigo lá (pelo menos nenhum digno de nota), mas parece que têm um pouco de influência, então não custa tentar. 4. Se isso também não der certo, ligue para o Papa e peça conselhos. O número dele é 39.06.698.83712, e acho que a central dele é infalível. 5. Se todas essas tentativas fracassarem, faça sinal para um disco voador que estiver de passagem e explique que é crucial você sair do planeta antes que a conta do telefone chegue. Douglas Adams Los Angeles, 1983, e Londres, 1985/1986”
― Douglas Adams, O guia definitivo do mochileiro das galáxias

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

“Douglas Adams was born in 1952 and created all the various and contradictory manifestations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: radio, novels, TV, computer game, stage adaptations, comic book and bath towel. He lectured and broadcast around the world and was a patron of the Dian Fossey”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Poszła do łóżka i śniła niespokojnie o papugach i innych ptakach. Wstała po południu i krążyła nerwowo po domu, nie mogąc zdecydować, co zrobić z resztą dnia, czy ściślej mówiąc — resztą życia.”
― Douglas Adams, Cześć, i dzięki za ryby. W zasadzie niegroźna

“Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealing to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature -the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode or rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people — all these things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if anything, even more magical in their simplicity. Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word “natural” that we have often taken to mean ”unstructured” in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple natural laws at work.They can all be described by numbers.
We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin. And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball.

People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything. I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts - it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“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