Best Douglas Adams Quotes., page 1

I couldn't resist posting these up.

I think in the future people will quote him as often as Shakespeare or Twain.

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phase, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?
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In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move.
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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 is a theory which states that if ever anybody 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.
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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. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get *there*. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.
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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea...
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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 movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
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It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. 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.
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All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss.
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It is not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end.
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A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79...
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Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
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It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase "As pretty as an airport" appear.
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The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
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A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.
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Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
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I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
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He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
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Plenty of people did not care for him much, but then there is a huge difference between disliking somebody -- maybe even disliking them a lot -- and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.
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Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own laws.
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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.
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Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.
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Very deep. You should send that into Reader's Digest, they've got a page for people like you.
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The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour 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.
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I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much, of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.
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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.
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If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
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Ford 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...
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Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner
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The first they saw on leaving the lift was a long concrete wall with fifty doors in it offering lavatory facilities for all fifty major life forms.Nevertheless,like every car park in the Galaxy throughout the entire history of car parks,this car park smelt predominantly of impatience.
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[Edited on 21-1-2004 by John bull 1]