"The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making."
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Quote collection
Douglas Adams quotes (page 8 of 29)
578 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
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"What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?"
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"Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet."
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"We all like to congregate at boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where bodies meet mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other."
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"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder... Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
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"Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?"
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"I come in peace...Take me to your lizard."
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"If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
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"I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons."
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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 world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome."
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"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."
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"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?"
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"I think all cats are wild. They only act tame if there´s a saucer of milk in it for them."
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"Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless"
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"The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye."
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"We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford. "..." "And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." "I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty. "Such as?" "Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords." "Would you die for them?" "Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No." "Well then." "Wouldn't see the point, to be honest."
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"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them 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 the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
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"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."
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