John Lloyd > 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

“J. M. Barrie founded a celebrity cricket team with Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, G. K. Chesterton, A. A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse.”
― John Lloyd, 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways

“From 1934 to 1948, the motto of the BBC was Quaecunque, Latin for ‘Whatever’.”
― John Lloyd, 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways

“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

“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

“Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps. TIGER WOODS”
― John Lloyd, QI: Advanced Banter

“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

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

“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

“René Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women.”
― John Lloyd, 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways

“Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it.”
― John Lloyd, The Book of General Ignorance

“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

“In May 2014, the Moon had faster broadband than most of rural Britain.”
― John Lloyd, 1,234 QI Facts to Leave You Speechless

“The phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is often said to refer to a metallic grid with circular holes in it, set under a pyramid of cannonballs on a ship’s deck to keep it stable. When this “brass monkey” got cold enough, the metal contracted and the cannonballs all popped out. In fact, the phrase means exactly what it says; the fake nautical euphemism is an attempt to make its rude humor more acceptable.”
― John Lloyd, QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

“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

“Douglas, I've made a few small changes to acknowledge the passing of the years. Hope you're alive and well in some parallel universe - you're sadly missed in this one.

John Lloyd, Oxfordshire, 2013”
― John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff

“William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, hunter, Indian-fighter and showman, joined the Pony Express – the West’s legendary mail service – at the age of fourteen, in response to an ad which ran: ‘WANTED young skinny wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 a week.”
― John Lloyd, The Noticeably Stouter Book of General Ignorance

“Viking names included ‘desirous of beer’, ‘squat-wiggle’, ‘lust-hostage’, ‘short penis’, ‘able to fill a bay with fish by magic’, ‘the man who mixes his drinks’ and ‘the man without trousers’.”
― John Lloyd, 1,411 QI Facts To Knock You Sideways

“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

“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

“Margaret Thatcher was part of the team that invented Mr Whippy ice cream.”
― John Lloyd, 1,227 QI 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