Mostly Harmless (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #5)

by Douglas Adams

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

since it is now well established that all known gods came into existence a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time.

Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.

Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”

“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.”

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

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”)

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!”