39 hits
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.-- Gen. Douglas MacArthur
"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements."-- Norman Douglas
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.-- Douglas Adams
When rats leave a sinking ship, where exactly do they think they're going?-- Douglas Gauck
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."-- Douglas Adams
"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."-- Douglas Adams
"The Hitch Hiker's Guide has not been an opera. It has however been a tapestry, if you count a woven bath towel as a tapestry."-- Douglas Adams
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.-- Douglas Adams
"If you ever have a free moment, you might consider checking out the travel brochures for the town in which you live. You might be amazed. You might not want to live there anymore."-- Douglas Coupland
2+2=5-ism: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. "Oh, all right, I'll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone."-- Douglas Coupland ('Generation X')
"I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course - the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end."-- Douglas Adams
"You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?"
"Really?" said Arthur. "No I didn't. For what offense?"
Trillian frowned. "What do you mean, offense?"
"I see."-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.-- Douglas Adams (Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
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.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
"Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see."-- Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency)
Anything invented before your fifteenth birthday is the order of nature. That's how it should be. Anything invented between your 15th and 35th birthday is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day, however, is against nature and should be prohibited.-- Douglas Adams
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without ploughing the ground.-- Frederick Douglass
'Anything that happens, happens'
'Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.'
'Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.'
'It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.'-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
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 bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio scripts)
This idea (of not noticing the identity of certain repetitive events) is interesting when we apply it to ourselves. Are there highly repetitive events which occur in our lives time and time again, and which we handle in the identical stupid way each time, because we don't have enough of an overview to perceive their sameness?-- Douglas Hofstadter
Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.-- Arthur Freed
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.-- Arthur C. Clarke
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. 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.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Ford was humming something. It was just one note repeated at intervals. He was hoping that somebody would ask him what he was humming, but nobody did. If anybody had asked him he would have said he was humming the first line of a Noel Coward song called "Mad About the Boy" over and over again. It would then have been pointed out to him that he was only singing one note, to which he would have replied that for reasons which he hoped would be apparent, he was omitting the "about the boy" bit. He was annoyed that nobody asked.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.-- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
"If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil."-- Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency)