Douglas Adams
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
"In cases of major discrepancy it's always reality
that's got it wrong....reality is frequently inaccurate."
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has
made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
"It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto nonexistent
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."
"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."
"Man [has] always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins
because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so
on—while 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 reason."
"Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were
considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be
breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from
polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now
thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday
speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and
totally un****ed-up personality."
"Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly
natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really
poor—at least no one worth speaking of."
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass
through three distinct and recognizable phase,
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 have lunch?"
"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."
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
"[His] study was a total mess,
like the results of an explosion in a public library."
"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. "
"There is a theory which states that if 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 which states that this has already happened."
"A common mistake people make when trying to design something
completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen."
"[God] puts an apple tree in the middle of [the Garden of Eden] and says,
do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise,
they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting Gotcha.
It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it...
Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality
which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you
know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end."
"He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather
be yarding his way down it..."
"He shifted his weight from foot to foot,
but it was equally uncomfortable on each."
"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."
"I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it."
"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their
mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and
observation he abandonded this theory in favor of a new one. If they
don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working."
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
"Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars
and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return,
you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have
aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how
far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly
if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister."
"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."
"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought,
their mouths probably seize up. After a few months'
consideration and observation he abandonded this theory in
favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their
lips, he thought, their brains start working."
—Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
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"If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something."
--Steven Wright
"A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory."
--Steven Wright
"A billion here and a billion there, and soon you're talking about real money."
--Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen
"American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective
employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for
employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference
between the men's room and the women's room without having little
pictures on the doors."
--Dave Barry
"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."
--Kingsley Amis
Steve and Brigid 
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