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"Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society."
-- John Adams

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams

With a rubber duck, one's never alone.
-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.
-- Morticia Adams

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
-- John Keats

Manners are one of the truly lost causes.
-- John Simon

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."
-- Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently)

"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."
-- Douglas Adams

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."
-- Douglas Adams

Wedding is destiny, and hanging likewise.
-- John Heywood

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

-- Mike Adams

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"All dogmas perish the thinking mind, especially ones you agree with."
-- Adam Richardson

"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

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

-- Henry Brooks Adams

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-- John Gilmore

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
-- John Donne

`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'
(Arthur experiencing the improbability drive at work)

-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one."
-- John Galsworthy

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

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

"You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone."
-- John Ciardi

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
-- John Stuart Mill

Quality without creativity is pompous;
Creativity without quality is infantile.

-- John Cerruti

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
-- John LeCarre

"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion."
-- Scott Adams

"Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being."
-- John Updike

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
-- John Gall ("Systemantics")

While skepticism is healthy, cynicism, real cynicism, is toxic.
-- John Oliver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmh4RdIwswE)

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
-- Adam Smith

`Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.'

`Very deep,' said Arthur, `you should send that in to the 'Reader's Digest'. They've got a page for people like you.'

-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"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

"Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."
"Ah," nodded Arthur, "Is he? Is he?"
(Arthur failing in his first lesson of galactic physics in four years)

-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.
-- John Keats

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
-- John Gardner

I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.
-- John Cleese

Poetry is the mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
-- John Masefield

"Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews."
-- John Updike

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
-- Douglas Adams (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

You probably go to museums and complain that Monet pressed down too hard with his crayons because the picture is all bumpy.
-- John Woods

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education.
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"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)

"Drive in no traffic and leave the turn signal on, it doesn't make any difference"
-- John Glenn (on why space would be a good place for seniors to live)

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)

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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)

Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.
-- John Burroughs

"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)

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.
-- John Berger

Why can't they have gay people in the army? Personally, I think they are just afraid of a thousand gay guys with M16s going, "Who'd you call a faggot?"
-- John Stewart

The great enemy of truth is often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
-- John F. Kennedy

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

'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)

"If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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)

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."
-- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987