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Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

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Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework...more

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Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect...more

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If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

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First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we ...more

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He hadn't realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers for the questions you continually ask of it, had never consci...more

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The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupi...more

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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 ...more

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The history of every major galactic civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and Sophisti...more

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Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see...more

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I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that...more

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You mean you've been in this same set of rooms here for... two hundred years?' murmured Richard. 'You'd think someone would notice, or think it was od...more

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One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living.

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She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. ...more

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I think we have different value systems." —Arthur"Well mine's better." —Ford