Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. New York: Random House, 2002, 135–136.<br>Also quoted by Richard Dawkins in his Eulogy for Douglas Adams (17 September 2001) http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html <br class="br">Contesto: If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

“The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”

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Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Origine: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.”

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Douglas Adams

“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.”

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Douglas Adams libro Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Origine: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."”

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Douglas Adams La lunga oscura pausa caffè dell'anima

Origine: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 1
Contesto: It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

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Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Origine: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy