Hitchhiker's Guide Quotes

"‘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."

"Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off."

"It is a curious fact, and one to which no-one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand variations on this phonetic theme.
The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/mnigs’ which is ordinary water served just above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthony-ks’ which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the only one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that their names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds."

"You’re never alone with a rubber duck."

"Does it worry you that you don’t talk any kind of sense?"

"You know, I’ve always felt there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."

"In an infinite universe anything can happen. Even survival. Strange, but true."

"The ruler of the Universe dozed lightly in his chair. After a while he played with the pencil and the paper again and was delighted when he discovered how to make a mark with the one on the other. Various noises continued outside, but he didn’t know whether they were real or not. He then talked to his table for a week to see how it would react."

"In Arthur’s mind the Universe still divided into two parts - the Earth, and everything else. The Earth having been demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass meant that this view of things was a little lopsided, but Arthur tended to cling to that lopsidedness as being his last remaining contact with his home."

"Why can’t people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?” said Arthur.
Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh.
“Forty-two!” he said with a malicious grin. “No, doesn’t work. Never mind."

"The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarise: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarise the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem."