Douglas Adams Quotes

376 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

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Space is big. Really 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, but that's just peanuts to space.

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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?

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Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

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

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The device [electronic I Ching calculator] also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to 4.... anything above 4 it represented merely as "A Suffusion of Yellow." Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway, enough to hand over twenty pounds of ready cash for the thing.

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He spent a lot of time flying. He learnt to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.

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The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, whilst the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck anyway, and certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.

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

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It's part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me.

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He sniggered. He didn't like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

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What was the self-sacrifice?" I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes." Why was that self-sacrifice?" Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly. I think we have different value systems." Well mine's better.

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LAXOBIGGING (ptcpl. vb.) Struggling to extrude an extremely large turd.

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And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.

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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.

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The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.

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The explosion was now officially designated an "Act of God."
But, thought Dirk, what god? And why?
What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15:37 flight to Oslo?

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Mark Carwardine's role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.

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Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.

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Ahenny (adj.) - The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves.

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

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Now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form—www—takes three times longer to say than what it's short for).

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The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.

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Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.

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You ARE Zaphod Beeblebrox?' 'Yeah,' said Zaphod, 'but don't shout it out or they'll all want one.' 'THE Zaphod Beeblebrox?' 'No, just A Zaphod Beeblebrox, didn't you hear I come in six packs?' 'But sir,' it squealed, 'I just heard on the sub-ether radio report. It said you were dead...' 'Yeah, that's right, I just haven't stopped moving yet.

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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.

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