Douglas Adams

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.
– Douglas Adams

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

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

A learning experience is one of those things that says, “You know that thing you just did?
Don’t do that.”
– Douglas Adams

If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now!
– Douglas Adams

Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable
itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
– Douglas Adams

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

He 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

God’s final message to his Creation: We apologize for the inconvenience.
– Douglas Adams

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered
planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is
obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
– Douglas Adams

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Adams

My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they
frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.
– Douglas Adams

We don’t have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to
be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.
– Douglas Adams

I’d far rather be happy than right any day.
– Douglas Adams

This planet has, or rather had, a problem, which was this: Most of the people living on it were
unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most
of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was
odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
– Douglas Adams

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

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
– Douglas Adams

When you blame others, you give up your power to change.
– Douglas Adams

Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees
things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from
seeing things that we don’t expect to see.
– Douglas Adams

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.
– Douglas Adams

The impossible often has a kind of integrity the merely improbable lacks.
– Douglas Adams

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

Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple. Ah, well… I’m not sure I
believe that.
– Douglas Adams

There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular
are: Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they spend so much of the intervening
time wearing digital watches?
– Douglas Adams

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

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

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.
– Douglas Adams

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for
and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre
and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
– Douglas Adams

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.
– Douglas Adams

Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game.
– Douglas Adams

My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.
– Douglas Adams

There is no point in using the word “impossible” to describe something that has clearly
happened.
– Douglas Adams

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.
– Douglas Adams

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

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

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural
part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting
and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
– Douglas Adams

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

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out
of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling
second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.
– Douglas Adams

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.
– Douglas Adams

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

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to
be.
– Douglas Adams

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

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.
– Douglas Adams

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.
– Douglas Adams

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

What 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