Thanks for this list Robbie!
I'm going to go through each of these 42 Quotations - one at a time (perhaps one a week?). I aim to idea mine each quote as if it were an invitation to explore an alien world:
42 Quotes
1. "The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42."
2. DON'T PANIC
3. "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
4. "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something Completely Foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." 5. "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." 6. "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." 7. "Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." 8. "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." 9. "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." 10. "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." 11. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks." 12. "Reality is frequently inaccurate." 13. "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." 14. "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable." 15. "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." 16. "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." 17. "See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting." 18. "Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner." 19. "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." 20. "Life is wasted on the living." 21. "Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable." 22. "You live and learn. At any rate, you live." 23. "Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news." 24. "The Guide says there is an art to flying, or rather a knack." 25. "I'd far rather be happy than right any day." 26. "If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?" 27. "We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" 28. "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." 29. "There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened." 30. "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." 31. "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." 32. "A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" 33. "The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." 34. "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." 35. "We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." 36. "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer." 37. "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." 38. "The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79." 39. "It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it." 40. "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands." 41. "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" 42. "But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit."
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