The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

by Douglas Adams

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

‘I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.’

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

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.

The band’s manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymballistics would be right.

if human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

To summarize: 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.

time was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.

they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary-school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

‘It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.’

when you came down to it, a major pair of shoes wasn’t something you could just replace by mucking about in multidimensional space–time.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.