“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

“Don't Panic.”

“"The Guide says there is an art to flying," said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."”

“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.”

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”

“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.”

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

“The story so far:”

“I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.”

“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”

“My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.”

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.'”

“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.”

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.”

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

“If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.”

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

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