Xan Sanchez > Xan's Quotes

“There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.”
― Samuel Johnson

“Love is friendship. Just with less clothes, which makes it far more brilliant.”
― Elizabeth Hunter, A Hidden Fire

“If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“something almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“A Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color blue.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.” “Buzz them?” Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. “Yeah,” said Ford, “they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."
(Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“How many roads must a man walk down?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Mostly harmless”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I was created to fulfill a function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Hey, this is terrific!" he said. "Someone down there is trying to kill us!"
"Terrific," said Arthur.
"But don't you see what this means?"
"Yes. We are going to die."
"Yes, but apart from that."
"Apart from that?!"
"It means we must be on to something!"
"How soon can we get off it?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Janx Spirit : Janx Spirit is a rather potent alcoholic beverage, and is used heavily in drinking games that are played in the hyperspace ports that serve the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta. The game is not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling, and is played like this: Two contestants sit at either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit — as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song :

“Oh don’t give me no more of that Old Janx Spirit
No, don’t you give me no more of that Old Janx Spirit
For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die
Won’t you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit”

Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass of his opponent – who would then have to drink it. The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played again. And again. Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic power. As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this -- partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Mc Donalds he thought. There's no longer any such thing as a Mc Donalds hamburger. He passed out. When he came around seconds later he found he was sobbing for his mother.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The mice were furious."
[...]
"Oh yes," said the old man mildly.
"Yes well so I expect were the dogs and cats and duckbilled platypuses, but..."
"Ah, but they hadn't paid for it you see, had they?"
"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
[...]
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."
Only one word registered with Arthur.
"Mice?" he said.
"Indeed Earthman."
"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sit coms?"
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"[...] These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."
The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.
"They've been experimenting on you, I'm afraid.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it,” said Marvin. “And what happened?” pressed Ford. “It committed suicide,” said Marvin,”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Proving nothing," said Ford. "I wouldn't trust that computer to speak my weight."
"I can do that for you, sure," enthused the computer, punching out more ticker tape. "I can even work out your personality problems to ten decimal places if it will help.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought. "Tell us!" "All right, said Deep Thought. "The answer to the Great Question..." "Yes...!" "Of Life, the Universe and Everything..." said Deep Thought. "Yes...!" "Is..." said Deep Thought, and paused. "Yes...!" "Is..." "Yes...!!!...?" "Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy