Douglas Adams Quotes

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

It's a lot of random situations that combine in a certain volatile form and create a bigger-than- the-whole situation that nobody could have predicted.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

Complex systems work until the day that they don’t work.

There's no such thing as a foolproof system. That idea fails to take into account the creativity of fools.

Innocence lost is not easily regained. The designer simply cannot predict the problems people will have, the misinterpretations that will arise, and the errors that will get made.

If you believe you have a foolproof system, you've failed to take into consideration the creativity of fools.

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.

Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another - like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.

I think paranoia goes from generation to generation. It's convenient to imagine that there's a few people controlling everything, that way it's manageable and small. But that's not life, life is messy.

Everything is randomly connected.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Serious accidents are frequently blamed on "human error." Yet careful analysis of such situations shows that the design or installation of the equipment has contributed significantly to the problems. The design team or installers did not pay sufficient attention to the needs of those who would be using the equipment, so confusion or error was almost unavoidable.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.

All I know is that the stable is empty, and the horse is gone. The rest I don't know. Whether [in the future] it be a curse or a blessing, I can't say. All we can see is a fragment. Who can say what will come next [and what is good or bad in the long run]?

I try not to make plans. Because, even the best laid plans etc. etc.

If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.

Just because you have a good hand today doesn't mean it's good tomorrow. And some of the things we're doing may become very disadvantageous at some point.

We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.

You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.