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, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.”
“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.'”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exists, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” thought God. “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“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.
The main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.
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. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so – but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous. This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but she could no longer be bothered to argue about it.
became increasingly obsessed with he problem of what had happened to all the ballpoints he’d bought over the past few years.