“… the more he did nothing, the less time he had to do anything.”

“Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.”

“That human, he's a lesser waiting to happen, in my opinion--nothing less, nothing more”

“Gheorghiu-Dej put more people in prison, but he had a motive. Ceausescu had no motive to do what he did. Things were worse under the last ten years of Ceausescu. It was terrible what he did.”

“For this, he realized, was the future. It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened—an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark; there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place—until this very moment when he and his machine had been thrust upon it, intruders who had overstepped their time.”

“He expects nothing, she thought, because he's never had anything. And nothing was expected of him. He was free in a way she never would be.”

“I was just telling myself to do nothing more and nothing less, and just telling myself to breathe because in that moment I literally felt like I was going to puke, I was so nervous. My normal is good enough, so I don't do anything more or anything less, I just have to do what I normally do.”

“Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason [Zaphood] had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.”

“…over time he would realize that the higher he was, the less danger he was in and the more he controlled the ever-ready mass.”

“A woman did what a woman had to, the best way she knew how. To do more was impossible, to do less, unthinkable.”