Philomena Cunk > Quotes

“Plato invented Platonic relationships. Before him, men and women couldn't just be friends. They have to have full sexual intercourse with each other.Which is, of course, what people in platonic relationships want to do anyway, whatever they tell people.”
― Philomena Cunk

“Wars of the Roses, The Far too hard to explain. There are just two things to remember. Firstly, it was the basis for Games Of Throne, except that the man who wrote that, Sir George RRRRRR Martin, changed the names so he wouldn’t get sued, and made it more realistic by filling it with dragons and dwarves and loads of tits. Lastly, the most violent event of the Wars of the Roses was the Battle of Bosworth, which Richard III tried to escape by burrowing under a car park. He hid there for centuries, but eventually we found him. Alas, it was too late, and he’d died of tarmac inhalation.”
― Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena

“In the Dark Ages, everything was side on, like Super Mario. But the Renaissance turned that into Super Mario 64.”
― Philomena Cunk, The World According to Cunk: An Illustrated History of All World Events Ever

“If I think therefore I am, what about other people? Do they think therefore they am? How can I tell if they're thinking therefore they am? Or am I just thinking they think therefore they am, but actually they're not real and I'm only thinking they am?”
― Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena

“You know when you read a word in a book and you sort of hear that word in your head- how do they get the sounds into the ink to make it play in your head?”
― Philomena Cunk

“Newspapers had different sections you didn’t want to read, like sport or overseas news, and stuff you did, like the word “jumble” and Fred Basset. You “scrolled” to the bit you wanted by putting the bits you didn’t want in the bin, which is bad for the planet. Luckily now we can get exactly the parts of a newspaper that we want delivered straight to our phone, though it has made painting a shelf harder because you can’t put the Daily Mail Sidebar Of Shame underneath to stop your table getting painty like you could with the family supplement. And it’s impossible to start a fire using the Guardian app. Which is good for the planet too. Some of the most famous newspapers such as The Times and TV Quick started in coffee shops in the 1800th century and by Victorian times they could be seen everywhere. Holding that day’s newspaper was a sign that you were keeping up with events. Either that or you were helping your kidnapper prove to the police that you weren’t dead yet. Newspapers made ordinary people feel part of big events, whether it was the sinking of the Titanic, men pretending to land on the Moon, the death of Lady Diana or Kinga off Big Brother sticking a wine bottle up her growler. Without newspapers we would never have heard of Piers Morgan, Rupert Murdoch or Jeremy Clarkson, so it’s understandable that in the 21st century the average person no longer buys a daily paper, in an attempt to stop it happening again.”
― Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena

“Newspapers are a sort of paper version of Twitter for your nan. Apparently they still exist, but only outside petrol stations near the briquettes, behind little plastic windows, like a little news zoo. Newspapers were how people in olden times found out what was going on the day before. The words in the newspaper would be made up by people called journalists. A “journalist” is what we nowadays call a “content provider,” someone who copies and pastes what people are saying on Twitter and puts it into sentences, and it’s those sentences that make Twitter into news. But in newspaper times, people in the news didn’t just type up what they were thinking and doing, journalists had to actually go out and find out what was going on themselves, usually by hacking people’s phone messages. It was a different world.”
― Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything: The Encyclopedia Philomena