- “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.”
- “I’d far rather be
happy than right any day.”
- “For a moment, nothing
happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
- “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.”
- “Perhaps I’m old
and tired, but I always think that 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.”
- “Would it save you
a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
- “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.”
- “We demand rigidly
defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
- “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.”
- “Anyone who is
capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to
do the job.”
- “Did I do anything
wrong today,” he said, “or has the world always been like this and
I’ve been too wrapped up in myself to notice?”
- “What’s so
unpleasant about being drunk?”
“Ask a glass of water!” - “The bird that
would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.”
- “Exactly!”
said Deep Thought. “So once you do know what the question actually is,
you’ll know what the answer means.”
- “My capacity for
happiness,” he added, “you could fit into a matchbox without taking
out the matches first”
- “Meanwhile, the
poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between
different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything
else in the history of creation.”
- “And all dared to
brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no
man had split before–and thus was the Empire forged.”
- “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.”
- “We’ll be saying a
big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out
there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.”
- “Looking up into
the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and
therefore meaningless”
- “And so the problem
remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with
digital watches.”
- “Here, for whatever
reason, is the world. And here it stays. With me on it.”
