Hitchhiker's Guide Quotes

I love you. I love your blog. I love your voice. Here's a towel. I know a pretty good restaurant at the end of the universe. Let's hitchhike together.

Ford was hanging from the towel, gripping its seams. Other hitchhikers had seen to modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric tools and utilities and even computer equipment into the fabric. Ford was a purist. He liked to keep things simple. He carried a regular towel from a regular domestic soft furnishings shop. It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern on it, despite his attempts to bleach and stone wash it. It had a couple of pieces of wire threaded into it, a bit of flexible writing stick, and also some nutrients soaked into a corner of it so he could suck it in an emergency, but otherwise it was a simple towel you could dry your face on. The only actual modification he had been persuaded by a friend to make was to reinforce the seams. Ford gripped the seams like a maniac.

'Here, suck this,' said Roosta, offering Zaphod his towel. Zaphod stared at him as if he expected a cuckoo to leap out of his forehead on a small spring. 'It's soaked in nutrients,' explained Roosta. 'What are you, a messy eater or something?' said Zaphod. 'The yellow stripes are high in protein, the green ones have vitamin B and C complexes, the little pink flowers contain wheatgerm extract.' Zaphod took it and looked at it in amazement. 'What are the brown stains?' he asked. 'Bar-B-Q sauce,' said Roosta. 'For when I get sick of wheatgerm.' Zaphod sniffed it doubtfully. Even more doubtfully, he sucked a corner. He spat it out again. 'Ugh,' he stated. 'Yes,' said Roosta, 'when I've had to suck that end I usually have to suck the other end a bit too.' 'Why,' asked Zaphod suspiciously, 'what's in that?' 'Anti-depressants,' said Roosta. 'I've gone right off this towel, you know,' said Zaphod, handing it back.

Mod Post!

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some people have chosen to see it as the final and clinching evidence for the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this. 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.' 'But', says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' 'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. 'Oh that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Arthur: You know, it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and I'm about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

“the invention of the scientific method and science is…the most powerful intellectual idea… it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with…that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it…But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it’.”

The great thing about human beings, I mean—while we make fun of it—is not only that we invent stuff that’s new, and better, and does things better. But even stuff that works perfectly well we can’t leave well enough alone, and it’s really the most sort of charming and delightful aspect of human beings, that we keep on inventing things that we’ve already got right once.