42 or More of Your Favorite Quotes by Douglas Adams

Picked by his biggest fans. Is that you?

Photo of a book by another author taken by the author.

Douglas Adams was an author, genius, and one of the best ape descendants to escape an insignificant planet on the outskirts of the universe.

Douglas Adams was born on March 11, 1952.

He still lives on in the minds of his fans and possesses them to write questionable poetry from somewhere in Ursa Minor.

If you want to highlight a quote and comment, that can be done here! Just sign in to this site and start telling us what these quotes mean to you. This could also allow you to point out any mistakes that I made. That is cool. I might even fix them. — Chris

Here are some of the best things that Douglas Noel Adams wrote or said:

1. “Don’t Panic!”
2. “In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
3. “There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.”
4. "What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “ You ask a glass of water.”
5. “Well, I’m game, we’ll see who rusts first.”
6. “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
7. "It seemed to me that any civilization that needed to include a detailed set of instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."
8. “Do not press this button. Do not press this button again.”
9. “The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” (A torch is a flashlight for people that speak English)
10. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
11. “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
12. “The mice were furious.”
13. “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.”
14. “Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.”
15. “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
16. “Mostly harmless.”
17. “Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
18. “Life? Don’t talk to me about life.”
19. “Ground! I wonder if it will be my friend?”
20. “Oh no, not again.”
21. “I’m up to here with cool, okay? I am so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.”
22. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
23. “Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
24. “Drink up, the world’s about to end.”
25. "Whatever may or may not happen from here on out, I just want you to know: I respect you. Just not a lot."
26. “We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is, therefore, your own problem.”
27. “I’ve done you before, haven’t I?”
28. "Gravity... They even keep it on at weekends."
29. “So long and thanks for all the fish.”
30. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

This actual list of recommended quotes got longer than I could copy and I am busy… These are from the best group on Facebook. Read the rest of these quotes daily by joining here. If you feel cheated by this list after reading the headline, then I invite you to reread quote #30. I believe DNA would have approved.

I write other cool stuff too. Some of it is about Douglas Adams. Sometimes I steal his ideas and pretend they are mine. He lives in my head without paying rent so I think this is fair. I steal ideas from other authors too. When they get to fighting up there, I tend to laugh like a maniac. I have this article set up so that I make no money from it. That is because I didn’t write most of the wonderful stuff here. I get two cents for my original thoughts. You can read them at ChrisWeberWrites.