"Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't work properly yet"
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Quote collection
Douglas Adams quotes (page 20 of 29)
578 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Presidents don't have power. Their job is to draw attention away from it."
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"The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up."
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"No. No games. He wanted her and didn't care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her."
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"...and the Universe, ... will explode later for your pleasure."
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"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs."
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"Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties."
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"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that."
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"But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods."
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"Beppu (n.) The triumphant slamming shut of a book after reading the final page."
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"Ford looked at him severely. And no sneaky knocking down Mr Dent's house whilst he's away, alright?" he said. The mere thought," growled Mr Prosser, "hadn't even begun to speculate," he continued, settling himself back, "about the merest possibility of crossing my mind."
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"There was a terribly ghastly silence. There was a terribly ghastly noise. There was a terribly ghastly silence."
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"Well the hours are good...' ... 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy."
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"The film project has been “twenty years of constipation,” and he likens the Hollywood process to “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”"
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""Does God know he [exists]?" "Of course he does. Otherwise, you could not have asked the question, and I could not have answered.""
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"Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?"
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"But nowadays everybody's a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally illuminated by the flash of paparazzi."
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"Arthur Dent: What happens if I press this button? Ford Prefect: I wouldn't- Arthur Dent: Oh. Ford Prefect: What happened? Arthur Dent: A sign lit up, saying 'Please do not press this button again."
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"We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphizing animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn't fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behavior was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human."
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"The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write."
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