Douglas Adams - Collected Quotes

"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 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." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode] 1978)

"The chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."  (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode] 1978)

"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 bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode]1978)

"You begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy", [radio series episode]1978)

"The main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did." (Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy", 1979)

"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." (Douglas Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)

"One of the interesting things about space [...] is how dull it is." (Douglas Adams, "Life, the Universe, and Everything", 1982)

"Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do." (Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish", 1985)

"The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis." (Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", 1987)

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks." (Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)

"Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through." (Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)

"Assumptions are the things you don’t know you’re making." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"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, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"It does highlight the irony that everything you go to see is changed by the very action of going to see it, which is the sort of problem which physicists have been wrestling with for most of this century." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along." (Douglas Adams, "Last Chance to See", 1990)

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." (Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)

"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." (Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless", 1992)