Douglas Adams Quotes The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. 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? The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks. I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandonded this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves. INFINITE: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that, in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big" time. Infinity is so big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here. 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? It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too. Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast. Life is wasted on the living. Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of. Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality. One always overcompensates for disabilities. I'm thinking of having my entire body surgically removed. That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting. The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind. The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79..... 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. If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news? 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. In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does. When you blame others, you give up your power to change. You can't dodge your responsibilities by saying they don't exist! 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. It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an airport' appear. For a moment, nothing happened.Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. God puts an apple tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting 'Gotcha.' It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it... because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end. Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner. I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge? 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. Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister. We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. Pierre