- Slartibartfast: Excuse the mess. Most unfortunate. A diode blew in one of the life support computers. When we came to revive our cleaning staff, we discovered they'd been dead for thirty thousand years. Who's going to clear away the bodies? That's what no-one seems to have an answer for.
- Lunkwill: O great computer, the task we have designed you to perform is this: We want you to tell us the Answer.
- Deep Thought: The answer? The answer to what?
- Lunkwill: Life.
- Fook: The universe.
- Lunkwill: Everything.
- Deep Thought: Tricky.
- Deep Thought: You're really not going to like it.
- Lunkwill: Tell us.
- Deep Thought: The answer to the Great Question...
- Lunkwill: Yes?
- Deep Thought: ...of life, the universe, and everything...
- Lunkwill: Yes?
- Deep Thought: ...is...
- Fook: Yes?
- Deep Thought: ...is...
- Lunkwill, Fook: *Yes*?
- Deep Thought: Forty-two.
- [stunned silence]
- Deep Thought: It was a tough assignment.
- Lunkwill, Fook: *Forty-two*?
- Arthur Dent: You know, this explains a lot. Because all my life, I've had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was.
- Slartibartfast: Oh, no. That's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe has that.
- Arthur: I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.
- Slartibartfast: I beg your pardon?
- Arthur: What? Oh, sorry. Fatuous thing to say, really.
- Slartibartfast: I thought so.
- Majikthise: I mean, what's the use of our sitting around half the night arguing whether there may...
- Vroomfondel: Or may not.
- Majikthise: ...be a God, if this machine only goes and gives you his phone number in the morning?
- Vroomfondel: That's right! We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.
- Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think 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.
- Slartibartfast: Science has achieved some wonderful things, I know, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
- Arthur Dent: And are you?
- Slartibartfast: No. That's where it all falls down, of course.
- Arthur Dent: Pity, it sounded like rather a good lifestyle otherwise.
- Frankie Mouse: Still, the best laid plans of mice.
- Arthur Dent: And men.
- Frankie Mouse: What?
- Arthur Dent: And men. The best laid plans of mice and men.
- Frankie Mouse: What have men got to do with it?
- [Cops corner Zaphod]
- Shooty: We don't want to shoot you, Beeblebrox.
- Zaphod Beeblebrox: Suits me fine.
- Zaphod Beeblebrox: Hey, I thought you said you didn't want to shoot us.
- Bang Bang: It isn't easy being a cop.
- Shooty: I don't go around gratuitously shooting people and then brag about it in seedy space rangers' bars. I go around gratuitously shooting people, and then I agonize about it afterwards to my girlfriend.
- Bang Bang: And I write novels!
- Shooty: Yeah, he writes them in crayon.
- Bang Bang: Though I haven't had any published yet, so I better warn ya, I'm in a *mean* mood.
- Shooty: Either you all give yourselves up and let us beat you up a little - though not too much, because we are firmly opposed to needless violence - or we blow up this entire planet... and one or two others that we noticed on the way over.
- [last lines]
- Ford Prefect: This is an ancient Betelgeuse death anthem. It means, after this, things can only get better.
- Lunkwill: Who are you? Get out of here!
- Majikthise: I am Majikthise.
- Vroomfondle: And I demand that I am Vroomfondle.
- Majikthise: It's all right, you don't need to demand that.
- Vroomfondle: All right. I am Vroomfondle. And that is not a demand. That is a solid fact. What we demand is solid facts!
- Majikthise: No, we don't, that is precisely what we don't demand.
- Vroomfondle: We don't demand solid facts. What we demand is a total absence of solid facts. I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel.
- Slartibartfast: [talking about the mice] In the field of management relations, they're absolutely shocking.
- Arthur: Oh, really?
- Slartibartfast: Yes, well, you see, every time they give me an order I just want to jump up on a table and scream!
- Arthur: Yes, I can see how that would be a problem.
- [first lines]
- Narrator: Arthur Dent, a perfectly ordinary earthman, was rather surprised when his friend Ford Prefect suddenly revealed himself to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Gilford after all. He was even more surprised when a few minutes later the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. But this was as nothing to their joint surprise when they were rescued from certain death by a stolen spaceship manned by Ford's semi-cousin, the infamous Zaphod Beeblebrox, and by Trillian, a rather nice astrophysicist Arthur once met at a party in Islington.
- Deep Thought: I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me. A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate! Yet I will design it for you! A computer which can calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question, A computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. You ourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its 10-million-year program! Yes, I shall design this computer for you and I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called the EARTH!