Nature & Animals Quote by Douglas Adams

Adams slips a banana peel under the grand machinery of opinion. The line starts like a harmless preference - fish is nice - then swerves into a fact so obvious it becomes meaningless: rain is wet. That pivot is the trick. He’s not confessing humility so much as mocking the way we inflate taste into verdict. By pairing a subjective like with a tautology, he collapses the distance between “I enjoy this” and “I know something,” exposing how often our judgments are just vibes dressed up as authority.

The self-deprecation (“so who am I to judge?”) isn’t a plea for forgiveness; it’s a satire of the cultural posture that treats every reaction as a hot take with moral weight. Adams’ comedy routinely targets human certainty - the need to categorize, rank, and proclaim - in a universe that is indifferent, messy, and mostly absurd. Here, he performs an intellectual pratfall: the speaker tries to sound discerning, realizes he’s basically reporting weather, and then undercuts himself before anyone else can.

Context matters because Adams wrote at the intersection of science-fiction wonder and British anti-pretension. His narrators often act like bureaucrats of the cosmic, documenting the infinite with the tone of someone reviewing lunch. The joke lands because it’s calibrated to modern discourse too: when everything becomes a judgment call, the most honest critique might be admitting your “judgment” is just another way of saying you have a mouth and a mood.