Top 50 John Lloyd Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A temherte slaq is an Ethiopian punctuation mark used to denote sarcasm.”

— John Lloyd

2. “Between 1908 and 1965, Winston Churchill drank 42,000 bottles of champagne.”

— John Lloyd

3. “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

4. “Misophonia n. Irrational rage and terror caused by the sound of people eating.”

— John Lloyd

5. “Margaret Thatcher was part of the team that invented Mr Whippy ice cream.”

— John Lloyd

6. “The rickshaw was invented by an American missionary, Jonathan Scobie, who first used it to wheel his invalid wife through the streets of Yokohama, Japan, in 1869.”

— John Lloyd

7. “What is literally the most misused word in the English language? The word ‘literally’ has been used to mean its opposite for over 200 years.”

— John Lloyd

8. “The lawnmower is the most dangerous item in the garden. The second most dangerous is the flowerpot.”

— John Lloyd

9. “Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it is explicitly illegal in Britain to use a machine gun to kill a hedgehog.”

— John Lloyd

10. “The Roman name for Paris was Lutetia, which translates into English as ‘Slough’.”

— John Lloyd

11. “St. Bernards have never, ever carried brandy barrels. The dog’s mission is entirely teetotal – apart from anything else, giving brandy to someone with hypothermia is a disastrous mistake – but tourists have always loved the idea, so they still pose wearing them.”

— John Lloyd

12. “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

13. “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. BERTRAND RUSSELL.”

— John Lloyd

14. “Zischeln is a useful German verb meaning “to whisper angrily.”

— John Lloyd

15. “The boa constrictor is the only living animal whose common name is exactly the same as its scientific name.”

— John Lloyd

16. “There are enough diamonds in existence to give everyone on the planet a cupful.”

— John Lloyd

17. “The Dyslexia Research Centre is in Reading.”

— John Lloyd

18. “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

19. “In the 1950s, to allow babies of students at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to enter the premises, they were re-defined as cats.”

— John Lloyd

20. “Information is fleeting. Human records are broken; new particles are discovered; fresh historical documents come to light. Dinosaurs turn out not to be giant grey iguanas after all, but multicoloured feathery proto-birds of all shapes and sizes. Right now, even the daddy of all facts, the Big Bang theory, is looking wobbly.”

— John Lloyd

21. “These are my confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it is because I have nothing to say.”

— John Lloyd

22. “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

23. “From 1934 to 1948, the motto of the BBC was Quaecunque, Latin for ‘Whatever’.”

— John Lloyd

24. “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

25. “If you could fold a piece of paper 51 times, its thickness would exceed the distance from here to the Sun.”

— John Lloyd

26. “In ancient Greek the word ‘idiot’ meant anyone who wasn’t a politician.”

— John Lloyd

27. “The world’s population spends 500,000 hours a day typing Internet security codes.”

— John Lloyd

28. “In March 2014, an Australian python swallowed a chihuahua and found itself chained to a kennel.”

— John Lloyd

29. “In Spanish, the word esposas means both ‘wives’ and ‘handcuffs’.”

— John Lloyd

30. “Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo all mean ‘capital’ in their respective languages.”

— John Lloyd

31. “Babbage was a brilliant mathematician but found human beings difficult to deal with. His intolerance of street musicians led to an organized campaign against him: his London home in Portland Place was bombarded by noise at all hours and abusive signs were hung in local shops.”

— John Lloyd

32. “The one who is not dead still has a chance.”

— John Lloyd

33. “Caffeine is made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen: the same as cocaine, thalidomide, nylon, TNT and heroin.”

— John Lloyd

34. “Just like humans, British cows moo in accents specific to their region.”

— John Lloyd

35. “British spies stopped using semen as invisible ink because it began to smell if it wasn’t fresh.”

— John Lloyd

36. “The name ‘United Nations’ was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s idea. He rushed to tell Winston Churchill, who was towelling himself stark naked in his bathroom.”

— John Lloyd

37. “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

38. “1 in 50 Americans claim to have been abducted by aliens.”

— John Lloyd

39. “The Wars of the Roses weren’t called that. Sir Walter Scott invented the name four centuries after the conflict.”

— John Lloyd

40. “Albanian dogs go “ham ham.” In Catalan, dogs go “bup bup.” The Chinese dogs say “wang wang,” the Greek dogs go “gav gav,” the Slovenians “hov hov,” and the Ukrainians “haf haf.” In Iceland, it’s “voff,” in Indonesia, it’s “gong gong,” and in Italian, it’s “bau bau.”

— John Lloyd

41. “The other Andamanese languages have no known relatives. They have five numbers: one, two, one more, some more, and all. On.”

— John Lloyd

42. “Mongolians will never eat a marmot’s armpits because “they contain the soul of a dead hunter.”

— John Lloyd

43. “Pedants should be aware that the English name for the world’s highest mountain should be spoken aloud as EEV-uh-rest, not EV-uh-rest.”

— John Lloyd

44. “If everyone in the world washed their hands properly, a million lives could be saved a year.”

— John Lloyd

45. “Portugal is the only country in the world where all drugs are legal.”

— John Lloyd

46. “The Republic of Ireland didn’t have postcodes until 2015.”

— John Lloyd

47. “All blue-eyed people are mutants. The first ones appeared as recently as 5,000 years ago.”

— John Lloyd

48. “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

49. “It is impossible to test accurately how long a severed head remains conscious, if at all. The best estimate is between five and thirteen seconds.”

— John Lloyd

50. “Since 1980, the salaries of executives in FTSE 100 companies have risen by 4,000% compared to 300% for their employees.”

— John Lloyd