# Douglas Adams' best quotes

The funniest and wisest lines from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the rest of Douglas Adams' writing, each with the book it comes from.

- 303 votes · 14 items
- Oct 29, 2020 · Sam Lewis
- https://even.best/en/l/1388/douglas-adams-best-quotes

## Top 12

1. **"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.** (37 · ▲42 ▼5) — The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979).
2. **In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.** (24 · ▲27 ▼3) — The opening of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980).
3. **The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.** (24 · ▲26 ▼2) — The Vogon fleet arriving over Earth, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979).
4. **Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.** (20 · ▲20 ▼0) — Ford Prefect, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979).
5. **A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.** (19 · ▲24 ▼5) — The Guide's entry on towels, origin of Towel Day (25 May).
6. **This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.** (18 · ▲21 ▼3) — Arthur Dent, on the day the Earth is demolished (1979).
7. **So long, and thanks for all the fish.** (13 · ▲16 ▼3) — The dolphins' farewell message before leaving Earth; title of the fourth book (1984).
8. **Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.** (11 · ▲13 ▼2) — Opening of the first book (1979): «And some said that even the trees had been a bad move.»
9. **I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.** (10 · ▲14 ▼4) — Adams, famously late with every book; collected in The Salmon of Doubt (2002).
10. **…a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.** (9 · ▲15 ▼6) — What the Nutri-Matic machine gives Arthur when he asks for tea (1979).
11. **Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.** (9 · ▲13 ▼4) — The third of his three rules about how we react to technology, in The Salmon of Doubt (2002).
12. **Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.** (7 · ▲15 ▼8) — Mostly Harmless (1992).
13. **He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.** (5 · ▲7 ▼2) — From The Salmon of Doubt (2002).
14. **Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction.** (-1 · ▲1 ▼2) — From The Salmon of Doubt (2002).

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.