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1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off QUOTES

1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off QUOTES

1 " In 2010, the BBC spent nearly £230,000 on tea, but only £2000 on biscuits. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

6 " 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 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

7 " Almost any domestic cat can run faster than Usain Bolt. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

8 " 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 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

9 " If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, a million lives could be saved a year. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

10 " As a baby, Oliver Cromwell was abducted by his grandfather’s pet monkey. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

11 " By law, buskers in Dublin must have a repertoire of at least 20 songs. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

12 " 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 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

13 " There are enough diamonds in existence to give everyone on the planet a cupful. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " Tour de France riders need to eat the equivalent of 27 cheeseburgers a day. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

19 " Margaret Thatcher was part of the team that invented Mr Whippy ice cream. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off

20 " In ancient Greek the word ‘idiot’ meant anyone who wasn’t a politician. "

― John Lloyd , 1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off