It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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?
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as 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 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.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
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.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?
Life is wasted on the living.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons.
I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.
Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.
The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
Time is bunk.
In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.
One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us.'
Books are sharks... because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't fix the weather - you just have to get on with it.
Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.
We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them.
If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we're probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.
There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'
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.
I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.
Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn't like it, it is it.
I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas... cultures... and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word 'freedom' means than I see much evidence of in America.
Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.
