“Don’t Panic” and more from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

After seeing The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and completely laughing out of pure enjoyment throughout much of the movie, I must say I’ve become pretty enthralled by the concepts it presents. I had never read the books or heard the radio show before, so maybe that explains why I’m so impressed. Those who had prior experience with author Douglas Adams’s universe said the movie could have been funnier. After plucking through some quotes, there are some great quotes that made it in the movie and others that didn’t.

Favorite Quotes from the movie and such:

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

* Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

* “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—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in 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.”

* “It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the product of a deranged imagination.”

* At a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

* “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the 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 so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

“`Oh dear,’ says God, `I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished 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.”

* ““If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”– Zaphod Beeblebrox

* What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?-The Whale as it plummets from the sky to death

* Arthur: You know, 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.
Ford: Why, what did she tell you?
Arthur: I don’t know, I didn’t listen.

* Movie Trailers also normally employ a deep voice that sounds like a seven-foot-tall man who has been smoking cigarettes since childhood.

BTW, check out the Google Search for the “answer to life, the universe, and everything.”