The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has
made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
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I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
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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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They lived in fear of the time they called, "the coming of the Great
White Hankerchief".
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They had three battle spaceships: The U.S.S. "Daring", the U.S.S.
"Audacity", and the U.S.S. "Suicidal Insanity." (quoted from memory)
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"It'll all end in tears! I know it!"
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Because he's an ignorant monkey who doesn't know better.
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Life... Don't talk to me about life.
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 * Marvin: "Do you want me to stick my head in a bucket of water,
I've got one with me"
 * Trillian: "Who is it?"
 * Zaphod: "It's Marvin, he's just phoned up to wash his head at us" 
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It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
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It hung in the air in exactly the way that bricks don't.
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 * "We're intelligent caring guys who you'd probably like if you met
us socially."
 * "I write novels"
 * "He writes them in crayon. And he's not had any published so let
me tell you he's in a mean mood."
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Flying's easy. Just throw yourself at the ground and miss.
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 * Zaphod: "Hand me the Rap Rod, Plate Captain!"
 * Waiter: "I'm sorry sir?"
 * Zaphod: "The phone, waiter, the phone. Gee, you guys are so unhip
it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."
 * Waiter: "Our whats, sir?" 
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Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl
of petunias as it fell was "oh no... not again!" Many people have
speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought
that, we should know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we
do now.
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Arthur: "And this is Eddie's sofa, is it?"
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Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to
grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after
all.
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We most definitely do represent the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers,
Sages, Luminaries and Other Professional Thinking Persons; we want that
machine off, and we want it off now.
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After all, what's the point of sitting up all night debating if there
may (or may not) be a God, if this machine calls you in the morning with
his phone number.
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We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
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Uh, Oh. Taking a phrase out of a satire and seriously applying it to the
real world? Dangerous. See PeterPrinciple.
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It's OK. It's only if I apply it to philosphy I've got a problem. I used
it again this morning, I think it helped.
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I speak of none but the machine which is to come after me.
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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 keep yourself occupied.
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 * "I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox"
 * "Are you the Zaphod Beeblebrox?"
 * "No, I'm a Zaphod Beeblebrox - I come in six-packs!" 
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The Editor-in-Chief's a guy named Maxelcat. I heard they had to buy a
new planet because he got so fat he kept sliding off the old one.
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 * Ford: "It's a bit like being drunk"
 * Ford and Arthur: "... aaarrrrrgggghhhh ..."
 * Arthur: "I'll never be cruel to a gin and tonic again"
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 * Ford: "It's rather unpleasantly like being drunk"
 * Arthur: "What's so unpleasant about being drunk ?"
 * Ford: "Try asking a glass of water" 
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"There's an infinite number of monkeys here who want to talk to you
about this script for Hamlet they've written."
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He's on an intergalactic cruise ... In his office?
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Time is an illusion -- lunchtime doubly so.
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Don't try to outweird me, six-eyes, I get stranger things than you with
my breakfast cereal!
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 * Arthur: What good is a dead telephone sanitizer?
 * Ford: Believe me, they're the best kind. 
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Here's a warm welcome to all the intelligent life forms out there. And
to the rest of you... the trick is to bang the rocks together, guys.
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 * If we're lucky, he'll throw us off the ship.
 * And if we're not?
 * He'll read us some of his poetry first. 
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(Zaphod, emerging from an excellent parody of a nightclub) - "That must
be the worst good time I've ever had."
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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. --Mostly Harmless
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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. --Mostly Harmless
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I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox. My father was Zaphod Beeblebrox II, my
grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox III, and my great-grandfather Zaphod
Beeblebrox IV. There was an accident with a time-machine and a
prophylactic.
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 * Arthur: You know, it's at times like this that I really wish I had
listened to what my mother had told me when I was young.
 * Ford: Why, what did she say?
 * Arthur: (crossly) I don't know, I didn't listen. 
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Ok, if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.
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If you can't scratch glass with it, I don't accept it.
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Almost but not completely unlike tea.
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The shoe event-horizon.
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We are going to get lynched, you know that?
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42.
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Stavromula Beta
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When asked about how work was coming along on the
HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy movie: "The Hollywood process is like trying
to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room
and breathing on it."
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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.
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One always overcompensates for disabilities. I'm thinking of having my
entire body surgically removed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable
lacks.
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The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and
miss.
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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 and
repair.
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The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest
possibility of crossing my mind.
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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.
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The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
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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.
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Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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Time is bunk.
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To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or
measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
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We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
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We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't
cope with is therefore your own problem.
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You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
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The problem with designing something completley foolproof is to
underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool.
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"The Lord knows I'm not an 'evil person!'" "Ah-ha! You just said The
Lord that means you believe in...." "Yes, The Lord is the name of my
cat."
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I love deadlines. I specially love the swooshing sounds they make as
they fly by.
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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.
%
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
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Arthur Dent hoped and prayed there wasn't an afterlife. Then, realizing
the contradiction, he merely hoped there wasn't an afterlife.
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Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes
something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything
that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It
doesnt necessarily do it in chronological order,though.
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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people
very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. -
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Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to
fly, but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly.
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On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on
the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life,
and the obliteration of all other life forms.
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Well I think we've sorted all that out now. If you'd like to know, I can
tell you that in your Universe you move freely in three dimensions that
you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call
time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first
fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and
there's all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions 13 to 22 that you
really wouldn't want to know about. All you really need to know for the
moment is that the Universe is a lot more complicated then you might
think.
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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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Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes
something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything
that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, causes itself to
happen again. It doesn't all necessarily happen chronologically, though.
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God's final message to Creation: Sorry for the inconvenience. 
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There is a theory which states that if anyone discovers just exactly
what the universe is for and why we are here, that it will instantly
disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and
inexplicable. Then there is a theory which states that this has already
happened.
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Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by
dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it.
So, if a dragon wouldnt be happy in the house, you have to put a red
fish bowl here or a window there. This sounds like complete and utter
nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsensethere
arent any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is
nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can
tell you how to build your house?
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...was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking... he
never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had
turned unfathomabily into an art form. He attacked everything in life
with a mixture of extrodinary genius and naive incompetence and it was
often difficult to tell which was which.
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We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
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Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.
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Who is this God person anyway?
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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.
%
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.
%
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.<BR>
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.
%
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.
%
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete
fools.
%
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.
%
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.