The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy discussion

My favorite: "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." - Zaphod

But there are so many more hilariously funny quotes from this book, along with ones that tell deep philosophies. Which one is your favorite?

There are way too many of them, but here are a few of my favorites:

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"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."

"For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen."

"He wouldn't save his grandmother from the Bugbladder Beast of Trall."

His son is now known as "Ix", which roughly translates as "boy who is not able to satifactorily explain what a hrung is, nor why it would chose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven."

"life is wasted on the living"

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.”

"In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

"Look, I'm up to here with cool, okay? I'm so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis. Now will you move before I blow it?"

"Don't you try to outweird me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."

“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."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.”

“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.”

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

"Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.

"Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked.”

"Almost, but not entirely, unlike tea."

"Oh no, not again."

Russel wrote: ""Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.""

Yup!!!

"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"

"Sir' I said to the universe, 'I exist.' 'That,' said the universe, 'creates no sense of obligation in me whatsoever."

"We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."

Oh and also...

"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

Don't panic.

"Good-bye and thanks for all the fish."

[Dolphins to humans just before the Earth was destroyed.]

Oh, but the nicest of them all is the Universal

w...e... a...p...o...l...o...g...i...s...e... for... the... i...n...c...o...n...v...e...n...i...e...n...c...e...

Petar wrote: "“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 ..."

This is one of my favorite ones, too, along with the one about how flying is just falling and then failing to hit the ground.

Also, everything about a traveler's towel. I even incorporated that into a travel essay, citing Adams in the first line: http://www.cstn.org/tales/general/tow...

Badger wrote: ""Good-bye and thanks for all the fish."

[Dolphins to humans just before the Earth was destroyed.]"

"So long and thanks for all the fish."

Thanks for the correction. Operating from memory.

So long and thanks for all the fish. :)

don't forget to feed the fish

From the introduction:

"And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..."

:0

"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 that You exist, and so 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 himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

This must be one of my favorites.

Don't panic!

So many from which to choose!

Right now, oh, who am I kidding, as far back as I can remember, maybe this one for hitting Truth:

"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 summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

It also has a nice Lewis Caroll-ian meter to it. :D

"It is not recorded what the petunia thought."

Curiously, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias, as it fell, was, "Oh no, not again!" Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly *why* the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

"The answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything is forty-two."

42 and Sheldon's 73 are the best numbers.

The part where the narration uses David Bowie as a measurement.

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.”

"A magician walked down the beach, but no one needed him" and "In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move."

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble‐sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand‐to‐hand‐combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might have accidentally "lost.". What the strag will think is that any man that can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

‘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.)