"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. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

"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..."

"Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged."

"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."

"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."

"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss."

"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."

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

"It's no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an airport' appear."

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."

"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty."

"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."

"Arthur Dent hoped and prayed there wasn't an afterlife. Then, realizing the contradiction, he merely hoped there wasn't an afterlife."

"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."

"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question, 'How can we eat?' The second by the question, 'Why do we eat?' And the third by the question, 'Where shall we do lunch?'"

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."

"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."

"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."

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own laws."

"Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to."

"Very deep. You should send that into Reader's Digest, they've got a page for people like you."

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."