One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.

Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren’t up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up.

The story goes that I first had the idea for The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck.

Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was. “Is there any tea on this spaceship?” he asked.

Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.

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.

Far out in the uncharted banckwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow pizza.

We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.

There is another theory that states: This has already happened.

Some say that the universe is made so that when we are about to understand it it changes into something even more incomprehensible. And then there are those who say that this has already happened.

Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else becomes eerily easy.

If God allows proof that he exists he robs people of faith and without faith what is God? Nothing.

I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe.

Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won’t engulf my head, I can see by infrared, How I hate the night. Now I lay me down to sleep, Try to count electric sheep, Sweet dream wishes you can keep, How I hate the night. -Marvin.

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.

There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.

I can see we’re in for a fabulous evening’s apocalypse.

Anything that happens, happens.

Being offended by things is the world’s big hobby at the moment. It’s almost taken over from wearing goatee beards.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

Presidents don’t have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it.

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.

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.

Life! Don’t talk to me about life!

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent, 35 year old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson.

When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.

We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

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

The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

A beach house isn’t just real estate. It’s a state of mind.

Even the evil-looking bird perched on a rod in the bar had stopped screeching out the names and addresses of local contract killers, which was a service it provided for free.

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word ‘safe’ that I wasn’t previously aware of.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

Space is really big-REALLY big.

If we see you smoking we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action.

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.

In an infinite Universe anything can happen.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two – and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was…

The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don’t even know you are making.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change.

I think media are at their most interesting before anybody’s thought of calling them art, when people still think they’re just a load of junk.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

One is never alone with a rubber duck.

Don’t spin your wheels and stress. Take a deep breath, center yourself and make a plan.

If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

Marvin started his ironical humming again. Zaphod hit him and he shut up.

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast.

Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: “Macintosh – We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end”.

Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax.

You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?

The Macintosh may only have 10% of the market, but it is clearly the top 10%.

Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.

Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water?

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.

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 have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.

She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it’s art while it’s being created.

I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you’ve always had.

Six pints of bitter, said Ford Prefect. And quickly please, the world’s about to end.

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn’t just jump over and have done with it.

You come to me for advice, but you can’t cope with anything you don’t recognize. Hmmm. So we’ll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business as usual, I suppose.

The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

Space is unimaginably big.

There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they’re not really parallel, and two, they’re not really universes.

How many roads must a man walk down?

The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn’t Have A Good Answer To.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.

And so the Universe ended.

How do you know you’re having fun if there’s no one watching you have it?

Democracy is all about not electing the wrong man-eating lizard.

Who is this god person anyway?

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

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

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously.

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

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.

You can’t dodge your responsibilities by saying they don’t exist!

If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

cuocup

A cup of tea would restore my normality.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.

Funny, how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

Earth: mostly harmless.

It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.

Don’t believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.

The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.

42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family.

The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.

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

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Don’t Panic.

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

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.

You’re paid a lot and you’re not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don’t want or need—for which you need more money.

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.

I’m so great even I get tongue-tied talking to myself.

The secret of healthy hitchhiking is to eat junk food.

Life is wasted on the living.

He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

I’ve had the sort of day that would make St. Francis of Assisi kick babies.

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.

Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all-around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.