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 refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer."
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.
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.
"I'd far rather be happy than right any day." Slartibartfast
Marvin: "I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
Zem: "Er, five."
Marvin: "Wrong. You see?"
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
"I don't want to die now. I've still got a headache. I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it"
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
"You guys are so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."
"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and 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."
[Ford Prefect:] "Why, what did she tell you?"
[Arthur:] "I don't know, I didn't listen."
"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
"My capacity for happiness," he added, "you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first"
For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, 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?"
Arthur: "Marvin, any ideas?"
Marvin: "I have a million ideas. They all point to certain death."
"What's up?" [asked Ford.]
"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."
I could calculate your chance of survival, but you won't like it.
"Listen, three eyes,", he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."
"Six pints of bitter," said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. "And quickly please, the world's about to end."
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." About a Magrathean sunset that Arthur finds magnificent.
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 or repair.
