"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." "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." "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer." "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 bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." "'The Guide says there is an art to flying', said Ford, 'or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.'" "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." "A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" "Don't Panic." "Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?" "The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." "You live and learn. At any rate, you live." "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." "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 chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." "Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws." "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." "Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." "Ford... you're turning into a penguin. Stop it." "It is known that there are 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 whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination." "'This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.'" "When you blame others, you give up your power to change." "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." "What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer." "'You know,' said Arthur, '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.'<br /> 'Why, what did she tell you?'<br /> 'I don't know, I didn't listen.'" "'If I ever meet myself,' said Zaphod, 'I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.'" "'So this is it,' said Arthur, 'We are going to die.'<br /> 'Yes,' said Ford, 'except... no! Wait a minute!' He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. 'What's this switch?' he cried.<br /> 'What? Where?' cried Arthur, twisting round.<br /> 'No, I was only fooling,' said Ford, 'we are going to die after all.' "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." "Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet." "He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which." "I'd far rather be happy than right any day." "He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife." "A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough." "'Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.'<br /> <br /> 'Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that." "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:<br /> 1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.<br /> 2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.<br /> 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." "Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly 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.<br /> 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.'<br /> '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.'<br /> 'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.<br /> '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 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." "Reality is frequently inaccurate." "'The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm." "All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place." "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 obvious." "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport'." "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 discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure." "Don't believe anything you read on the Net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." "We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others." "Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn't Have A Good Answer To." "My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes." "'Did I do anything wrong today,' he said, 'or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?'" "The impossible often has a kind of integrity the merely improbable lacks." "42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family." "A cup of tea would restore my normality." "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." "There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again." "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." "We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this 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." "I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?" "What I need... is a strong drink and a peer group." "Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast." "There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out." "My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay." "Life is wasted on the living." "In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." "Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise." "Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner." "My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontė, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.<br /> <br /> This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.<br /> <br /> However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontė piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky." "'I have detected disturbances in the wash.'<br /> <br /> 'The wash?'<br /> <br /> 'The space-time wash.'<br /> <br /> 'Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?'<br /> <br /> 'Eddies in the space-time continuum.'<br /> <br /> 'Ah...is he. Is he.'<br /> <br /> 'What?'<br /> <br /> 'Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?" "There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick." "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." "God's final message to his Creation: 'We apologize for the inconvenience.'" "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands." "It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training." "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 for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!'" "Ow! My brains!" "We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" "Ahenny (adj.) - The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves." "Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means." "The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. " "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." "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." "One is never alone with a rubber duck." "We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books." "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's definition of 'Universe':<br /> <br /> The Universe is a very big thing that contains a great number of planets and a great number of beings. It is Everything. What we live in. All around us. The lot. Not nothing. It is quite difficult to actually define what the Universe means, but fortunately the Guide doesn't worry about that and just gives us some useful information to live in it.<br /> <br /> Area: The area of the Universe is infinite.<br /> <br /> Imports: None. This is a by product of infinity; it is impossible to import things into something that has infinite volume because by definition there is no outside to import things from.<br /> <br /> Exports: None, for similar reasons as imports.<br /> <br /> Population: None. Although you might see people from time to time, they are most likely products of your imagination. Simple mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be zero. Why? Well given that the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is zero, therefore the average population of the Universe is zero, and so the total population must be zero.<br /> <br /> Art: None. Because the function of art is to hold a mirror up to nature there can be no art because the Universe is infinite which means there simply isn't a mirror big enough.<br /> <br /> Sex: None. Although in fact there is quite a lot, given the zero population of the Universe there can in fact be no beings to have sex, and therefore no sex happens in the Universe." "And we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere...and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys.- Galaxy Radio" "There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened." "'All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.'<br /> <br /> 'No,' said the old man, 'that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.'" "Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future." "'Life,' said Marvin dolefully, 'loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.'" "See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that." "This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for." "Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied." "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" "And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything." "Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does." "Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else becomes eerily easy." "Anything that happens, happens.<br /> <br /> Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.<br /> <br /> Anything that, in happening, happens again, happens again.<br /> <br /> It doesn't necessarily happen in chronological order, though." "'Why?' is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you 'What's the time?' or 'When was the battle of 1066?' or 'How do these seatbelts work that go tight when you slam the brakes on, Daddy?' The answers are easy and are, respectively, 'Seven-thirty in the evening,' 'Ten-fifteen in the morning,' and 'Don't ask stupid questions.'" "Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying "Blood...blood...blood...blood..." "One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he didn't actually understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid." "'The point is, you see,' said Ford, 'that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.'" "I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously." "'You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.'<br /> <br /> 'Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.'" "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." "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." "For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while." "Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was: 'Oh no, not again.' Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that, we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now." "He had personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts." "If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion." "I don't go to mythical places with strange men." "The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to." "The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore." "Time affords us the ability to blame past errors on others while whole heartedly pronouncing our futures successes." "The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Rafaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river." "The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.<br /> <br /> It wasn't infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself." "A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment." "It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing." "Yes, it is true that sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think that's something you might have to consider." "And as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and water him." "He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. 'I will go mad!' he annouced." "A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach, and drifted back to the sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea." "He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he'd picked up without knowing it in the Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there." "Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind. It was very clear and very distinct, and he had now come to recognize these thoughts for what they were. His instinct was to resist them." "There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound." "He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot." "Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through." "'But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment.'<br /> 'I've seen it. It's rubbish,' said Zaphod,'nothing but a gnab gib.'<br /> 'A what?'<br /> 'Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy.'" "'I don't know what I'm looking for.' 'Why not?' 'Because ... because ... I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn't be able to look for them.'" "It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs." "The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit." "'What was the self-sacrifice?'<br /> 'I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes.'<br /> 'Why was that self-sacrifice?'<br /> 'Because they were mine!' said Ford, crossly.<br /> 'I think we have different value systems.'<br /> 'Well mine's better.'" "During this century (the twentieth) we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.<br /> <br /> I expect that history will show 'normal' mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. 'Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?'<br /> <br /> 'Yes, child, that's why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.'<br /> <br /> 'What was the Restoration again, please, miss?'<br /> <br /> 'The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.'" "'So, like I said, these are a bunch of really sweet guys, but you wouldn't want to share a Galaxy with them, not if they're just gonna keep at it, not if they're not gonna learn to relax a little. I mean it's just gonna be continual nervous time, isn't it, right? Pow, pow, pow, when are they next coming at us? Peaceful coexistence is just right out, right? Get me some water somebody, thank you.'<br /> <br /> He sat back and sipped reflectively.<br /> <br /> 'OK,' he said, 'hear me, hear me. It's, like, these guys, you know, are entitled to their own view of the Universe. And according to their view, which the Universe forced on them, right, they did right. Sounds crazy, but I think you'll agree. They believe in ...'<br /> <br /> He consulted a piece of paper which he found in the back pocket of his Judicial jeans.<br /> <br /> 'They believe in 'peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms'." "Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this." "There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind." Douglas Adams