Douglas Adams > Quotes

“Yes,” said Ford Prefect, “it’s dark.” “No light,” said Arthur Dent. “Dark, no light.” One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.” “I care about lots of things,” said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Between you and me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Hey,” he said, “I thought you said you didn’t want to shoot us!” and ducked again. They waited. After a moment a voice replied, “It isn’t easy being a cop!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“similar to that which Macbeth had towards murdering people – initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He took a deep breath. He didn’t need to do this since his body was supplied with the peculiar assortment of gases it required for survival from a small intravenous device strapped to his leg. There are times, however, when whatever your metabolism you have to take a deep breath.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure and enormously long lunch breaks.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Five minutes later he was out of there. About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organization into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds. The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything. It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalize its own defenses against the information’s ever emerging. It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high political office. The other minute was spent discovering that the computer system already had a mental block. A big one. He would never have discovered it if he hadn’t been busy engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course, then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to deny knowledge of and was generally so convincing that even Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake. He was impressed. He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn’t bother to install his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones that were already there, which then called themselves when questioned, and so on. He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had installed himself, only to discover they weren’t there. Cursing, he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them at all. He was just about to start installing them all over again when he realized that the reason he couldn’t find them was that they were working already. He grinned with satisfaction. He tried to discover what the computer’s other mental block was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something to do with something in the building, and something to do with the number thirteen. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been imagining it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“..çünkü ben bir ölüyüm, ki böyle olmak insana mükemmel ve hiçbir şeyle engellenınemiş bir bakış açısı sağlıyor. Bizim oralarda 'hayat yaşayanların elinde ziyan olur' diye bir söz vardır.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Thirty seconds into the conversation, and already he’d blown it. Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“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.' ...

'I only decide about my Universe,' continued the man quietly. 'My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.”
― Douglas Adams

“Eskiden beri ileri sürüldüğü gibi, evren tedirgin edici büyüklükte bir yerdir ve pek çok kişi sakin bir hayat uğruna bu gerçeği görmezden gelmeye meyillidir. Birçokları kendi tasarladıkları daha küçük bir yere memnuniyetle taşınmaktadır, hatta aslında çoğunluğun yaptığı da budur.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Outside, he said to her:
'I think the Universe is in pretty good hands, yeah?'
'Very good,' said Trillian. They walked off into the rain.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I was most upset to hear of its destruction.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“That’s very good thinking, you know. Turn on the Improbability Drive for a second without first activating the proofing screens. Hey, kid, you just saved our lives, you know that?” “Oh,” said Arthur, “well, it was nothing really ….” “Was it?” said Zaphod. “Oh well, forget it then. Okay, computer, take us in to land.” “But …” “I said forget it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, “Do what you like guys, oh, but don’t eat the apple.” Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting, “Gotcha.” It wouldn’t have made any difference if they hadn’t eaten it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because if you’re dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won’t give up. They’ll get you in the end.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“After a while I had to admit that the forest wasn't that bad. Cold, wet and slippery, and continually trying to wrench my legs off at the knees with some bloody tangled root or other, but it also had a kind of fresh glistening quality that wouldn't go away however much I glowered at it.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Life," he said, "will be a very great deal less weird without you!"
Arthur was stunned.
"Do you know," he said, "I think that's the nicest thing any-body's ever said to me?”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Two to the power of twenty thousand to one against and falling.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“My name,’ he said, ‘. . . is Slartibartfast.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“My God,’ complained Arthur, ‘you’re talking about a positive mental attitude and you haven’t even had your planet demolished today. I woke up this morning and thought I’d have a nice relaxed day, do a bit of reading, brush the dog…It’s now just after four in the afternoon and I’m already being thrown out of an alien spaceship six light-years from the smoking remains of the Earth!’ He spluttered and gurgled as the Vogon tightened his grip. ‘All right,’ said Ford, ‘just stop panicking!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Way off in some indistinguishable distance—was it a mile or a million or a mote in his eye?—was a stunning peak that overarched the sky, climbed and climbed and spread out in flowering aigrettes,1 agglomerates,2 and archimandrites.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“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”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“It's . . . well, it's a long story," he said, but the question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-tw0..."
"I'm afraid," he said at last,"that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can be known about the same Universe."
"Except," said Prak, struggling to sort a thought out, "if it happened, it seems the Question and the Answer would just cancel each other out, and take the Universe with them, which would be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. It is possible that this has already happened," he added with a weak smile, "but there is a certain amount of uncertainty about it.”
― Douglas Adams

“short buzz followed, then silence. “They want to get rid of us,” said Trillian nervously. “What do we do?” “It’s just a recording,” said Zaphod. “We keep going. Got that, computer?” “I got it,” said the computer and gave the ship an extra kick of speed. They waited. After a second or so came the fanfare once again, and then the voice. “We would like to assure you that as soon as our business is resumed announcements will be made in all fashionable magazines and color supplements, when our clients will once again be able to select from all that’s best in contemporary geography.” The menace in the voice took on a sharper edge. “Meanwhile, we thank our clients for their kind interest and would ask them to leave. Now.” Arthur looked round the nervous faces of his companions. “Well, I suppose we’d better be going then, hadn’t we?” he suggested. “Shhh!” said Zaphod. “There’s absolutely nothing to be worried about.” “Then why’s everyone so tense?” “They’re just interested!” shouted Zaphod. “Computer, start a descent into the atmosphere and prepare for landing.” This time the fanfare was quite perfunctory, the voice now distinctly cold. “It is most gratifying,” it said, “that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives…. Thank you.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy