Quote of the Day: Douglas Adams

Easter is here and thus there are legitimate reasons to do nothing, eat loads, spend time with friends and family and generally relax. To those more religious than me, this is an important holiday to be celebrated, but alas as I'm prepared to tolerate religion if it gives me time off work... :)

Wanted to share with you a great site for perusing when you have more time on your hands (like now) and that is the WikiQuote Project, a resource similar to Wikipedia, the web's free encyclopedia, but with the aim of collecting authentic quotes from as many sources as possible. Therefore my quote of the day comes from the WikiQuote project's entries for Douglas Adams and is on the subject of evolution:

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. 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 of 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.

• As quoted in Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams

Comments

[KlausinLA]

You could post one Douglas Adams quote every day and I would always swing by as long as the web and myself continue to exist.

[J]

Douglas Adams was king. In my book, he's right up there with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, the Monty Python crew and the British humour chaps in that league. Thanks for sharing the quote and the link! :-)

PS: all happier now... :-)