The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1)

by Douglas Adams

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.

‘Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.’

‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘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.’

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.

OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?’

She wished she knew what it was she was trying not to think about.

Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of.

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?

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was, Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

don’t know what I’m looking for.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because…because…I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them.’

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.

‘that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.’

‘Maybe. Who cares?’ said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. ‘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.

‘What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.’ ‘And are you?’ ‘No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.’

It has already been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable event in the history of the Universe.’ ‘What were the first two?’ ‘Oh, probably just coincidences,’