First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Just for Fun, Writing
2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change.
—Douglas Adams
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.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Self-Discovery
We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Uncertainty
Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them what to do. Don’t get bitten in the first place.
—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
Topics: Challenges
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Self-Discovery, Journeys
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 drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Space
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Character, Service, Brothers
One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work – supposing you’re trying to find out how a cat works—you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you’ve got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn’t a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Cats
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Responsibility
So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Perception
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Life
The moment at which two people, approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognize each other and immediately pretend they haven t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognizing each other the whole length of the corridor.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Enemies, Enemy
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
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
Topics: Computers
If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.
—Douglas Adams
One always overcompensates for disabilities. I’m thinking of having my entire body surgically removed.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Disability
There is an art, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Flying, Perspective
People will then often say, “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Atheism
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not everyone is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: The Universe
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
Topics: Experience, Learning
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Illusion, One liners, Time
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Design, Foolishness, Trying
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
Topics: Dreams
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.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Thinking
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?
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Atheism
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
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.
—Douglas Adams
Topics: Life
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
—Douglas Adams
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
John Fowles English Novelist
George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) English Novelist
George Orwell English Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
Terry Pratchett English Fantasy Writer
Arthur C. Clarke English Science-fiction Writer
J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
Stephen Fry English Actor, Writer
Peter Ustinov British Actor, Playwright
Philip Pullman English Children’s Author, Dramatist
Ian McEwan (b.1948) British Novelist, Short-story Writer