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(“I love deadlines,” he said once. “I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”)
The first episode went out on BBC Radio 4 at 10:30 P.M. on Wednesday, March 8, 1978, in a huge blaze of no publicity at all. Bats heard it. The odd dog barked.
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far,
perspective
If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up.
“You can’t throw us into space,” yelled Ford, “we’re trying to write a book.”
Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.
“Time,” said Arthur weakly, “is not currently one of my problems.”
“we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
“Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “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.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.
“have a nice diurnal anomaly.”
“The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
How do you know you’re having fun if there’s no one watching you have it?
POPULATION: None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Sometimes I think #DouglasAdams makes better sense than @neiltyson
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.
“They believe in ‘peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.’
“And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.”
The history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure and enormously long lunch breaks.
Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.
They tried sending off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in distant parts, but these usually took thousands of years to get anywhere. By the time they eventually arrived, other forms of travel had been discovered which made use of hyperspace to circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it was that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got there.
“Life,” he said, “will be a very great deal less weird without you!”
