1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off Quotes

“In 2010, the BBC spent nearly £230,000 on tea, but only £2000 on biscuits.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it is explicitly illegal in Britain to use a machine gun to kill a hedgehog.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“In the 1950s, to allow babies of students at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to enter the premises, they were re-defined as cats.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“James Joyce married a woman named Nora Barnacle. She once said to him, ‘Why don’t you write books people can read?”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don’t eat rice.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“The Dyslexia Research Centre is in Reading.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, a million lives could be saved a year.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Almost any domestic cat can run faster than Usain Bolt.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“There is no known scientific way of predicting earthquakes. The most reliable method is to count the number of missing cats in the local paper: if it trebles, an earthquake is imminent.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“About 200,000 academic journals are published in English each year. The average number of readers per article is five.   The average numbers of readers of any given published scientific paper is said to be 0.6.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Kummerspeck (‘grief bacon’) is German for the weight put on from eating too much when feeling sorry for yourself.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“In 1917, John D. Rockefeller could have paid off the whole US public debt on his own. Today, Bill Gates’s entire fortune would barely cover two months’ interest.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“The Wars of the Roses weren’t called that. Sir Walter Scott invented the name four centuries after the conflict.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Sending a man to the Moon and finding Osama Bin Laden cost the US government about the same amount of time and money: ten years and $100 billion.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“In 1997, 39 people in the UK found themselves in hospital with tea-cosy-related injuries.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Margaret Thatcher was part of the team that invented Mr Whippy ice cream.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“In ancient Greek the word ‘idiot’ meant anyone who wasn’t a politician.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“There are enough diamonds in existence to give everyone on the planet a cupful.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“When John Hetherington ventured out in public wearing the first top hat, it was considered so shocking that children screamed, women fainted, and a small boy broke his arm in the chaos.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“By law, buskers in Dublin must have a repertoire of at least 20 songs.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“As a baby, Oliver Cromwell was abducted by his grandfather’s pet monkey.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Tour de France riders need to eat the equivalent of 27 cheeseburgers a day.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo all mean ‘capital’ in their respective languages.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“There is more information in one edition of the New York Times than the average person in 17th-century England would have come across in a lifetime.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“Misophonia n. Irrational rage and terror caused by the sound of people eating.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“The world’s population spends 500,000 hours a day typing Internet security codes.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“British moths include the Uncertain, the Confused, the Magpie, the Lackey, the Drinker, the Streak, the Ruddy Highflyer, the Buff Arches, the Figure of Eighty, the Anomalous, the Dark Dagger, the Lettuce Shark, the Isabelline Tiger, the Waved Tabby and the Mother Shipton.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“The Roman name for Paris was Lutetia, which translates into English as ‘Slough’.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“All blue-eyed people are mutants. The first ones appeared as recently as 5,000 years ago.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

“The boa constrictor is the only living animal whose common name is exactly the same as its scientific name.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off