Somewhere on a fetid, fog-bound mud bank on Vogsphere there stands, surrounded by the dirty, broken and empty carapaces of the last few jeweled scuttling crabs, a small stone monument which marks the place where, it is thought, the species Vogon Vogonblurtus first arose. On the monument there is carved an arrow which points away, into the fog, under which is inscribed in plain, simple letters the words "The buck stops there."

"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed," Marvin said.

He reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again.

It was for the sake of this day that he had first decided to run for the Presidency, a decision which had sent waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy—Zaphod Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the President? Many had seen it as a clinching proof that the whole of known creation had finally gone bananas.

Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

"The insurance business is completely screwy now. 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."

"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all," said Mr. Prosser.

"Well sir," snapped the fragile little creature, "if you could be a little cool about it..."
"Look," said Zaphod. "I'm up to here with cool, okay? I'm so amazingly cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I'm so hip I have trouble seeing over my pelvis. Now will you move before I blow it?"

A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over.

Marvin droned,
Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness don't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.
He paused to gather artistic and emotional strength to tackle the next verse.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.

If any of them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment, they would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping past them to his certain death and flipping the finger at them.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

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 actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying "And another thing..." twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument.

It would be hard to say which he was more frightened of: that he might have hurt the person he had inadvertently sat on or that the person he had inadvertently sat on would hurt him back.

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..." and so on.

"Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."

“I don’t want to die now! I’ve still got a headache! I don’t want to go to heaven with a headache, I’d be all cross and wouldn’t enjoy it!”

The current editor-in-chief, Stagyar-zil-Doggo, was a dangerously unbalanced man who took a homicidal view of contributing staff turning up in his office without pages of fresh, proofed copy, and had a battery of laser-guided guns linked to special scanning devices in the door frame to deter anybody who was merely bringing extremely good reasons why they hadn't written any. Thus was a high level of output maintained.