01UndatedA towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
02UndatedIf 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.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
03UndatedIt can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
04UndatedHe hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
05UndatedI don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
06UndatedWhat to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
07UndatedMy 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.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
08UndatedIf I ever meet myself,' said Zaphod, 'I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
09UndatedHe attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
11UndatedCuriously 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.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
12UndatedOne 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.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
14UndatedThe 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.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
15UndatedArthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?Ford: We're safe.Arthur: Oh good.Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. that I wasn't previously aware of.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
16UndatedArthur 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.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
17UndatedThe impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
18UndatedSimple. 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.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
19UndatedIt is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die."His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
20UndatedI think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?Douglas Adams / quote ↗
21UndatedI have detected disturbances in the wash.''The wash?''The space-time wash.''Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?''Eddies in the space-time continuum.''Ah...is he. Is he.''What?''Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?Douglas Adams / quote ↗
23UndatedFord carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying "Blood...blood...blood...blood...Douglas Adams / quote ↗
24UndatedWhy?' is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you 'What's the time?' or 'When was the battle of 1066?' or 'How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?' The answers are easy and are, respectively, 'Seven-thirty in the evening,' 'Ten-fifteen in the morning,' and 'Don't ask stupid questions.Douglas Adams / quote ↗
