Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
I have rooms full of little dongly things and don't want any more. Half the little dongly things I've got, I don't even know what gizmo they're for. More importantly, half the gizmos I've got, I don't know where their little dongly thing is.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote humorously highlights how we often accumulate unnecessary gadgets and lose track of their purposes.
In this quote, Douglas Adams playfully expresses the overwhelming nature of collecting various gadgets and devices that often serve little purpose. He reflects on the absurdity of having numerous items whose functions are forgotten or unknown, poking fun at consumer culture and our tendencies to hoard things that may not add value to our lives.
Themes
GadgetsHumorConsumerismSocietyAbsurdity
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote during a tech conference to highlight the unexpected challenges of advancing technology.
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All quotes →"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
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Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
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Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
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What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
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We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
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