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utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
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, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
‘But the plans were on display . . .’ ‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’ ‘That’s the display department.’ ‘With a torch.’ ‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’ ‘So had the stairs.’ ‘But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.’
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.
hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious,
If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.
‘you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.’ ‘What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?’ ‘You ask a glass of water.’
‘Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.
Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem ‘Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning’ four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been ‘disappointed’ by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles when
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‘it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t listen.’
Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.
you hold a lungful of air you can survive in the total vacuum of space for about thirty seconds. However, it does go on to say that what with space being the mind-boggling size it is the chances of getting picked up by another ship within those thirty seconds are two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand seven hundred and nine to one against.
Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell out of it too, materializing in a large wobbly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system. The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one last man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later.
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air. It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.
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?
Stress and nervous tension are now serious social problems in all parts of the Galaxy, and it is in order that this situation should not be in any way exacerbated that the following facts will now be revealed in advance. The planet in question is in fact the legendary Magrathea. The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defence system will result merely in the breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of somebody’s upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale. In order that some sense
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Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more. This is a complete record of its thought from the moment it began its life till the moment it ended it. Ah . . . ! What’s happening? it thought. Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here?
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It is possible that her remark would have commanded greater attention had it been generally realized that human beings were only the third most intelligent life form present on the planet Earth, instead of (as was generally thought by most independent observers) the second.
‘I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.’
Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long, and thanks for all the fish.
He gestured Arthur towards a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the ribcage of a stegosaurus. ‘It was made out of the ribcage of a stegosaurus,’ explained the old man
All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.’ ‘No,’ said the old man, ‘that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.’
‘Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it,’ said Marvin. ‘And what happened?’ pressed Ford. ‘It committed suicide,’ said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.
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 theory which states that this has already happened.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
