Top 180 Randall Munroe Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’”

— Randall Munroe

2. “You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.”

— Randall Munroe

3. “There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.”

— Randall Munroe

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4. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.”

— Randall Munroe

5. “The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.”

— Randall Munroe

6. “But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.”

— Randall Munroe

7. “If at first you don’t succeed, that’s one data point.”

— Randall Munroe

8. “The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space-each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.”

— Randall Munroe

9. “High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. – Hendrik Willem Van Loon.”

— Randall Munroe

10. “Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out.”

— Randall Munroe

11. “Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they’re frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.”

— Randall Munroe

12. “You don’t use science to show you’re right, you use science to become right.”

— Randall Munroe

13. “I never trust anyone who’s more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.”

— Randall Munroe

14. “That’s if everything goes as planned.”

— Randall Munroe

15. “As comedian Ron White said about hurricanes, “It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.”

— Randall Munroe

16. “A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.”

— Randall Munroe

17. “It’s weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it’s literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.”

— Randall Munroe

18. “I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals – or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it’s not all that interesting.”

— Randall Munroe

19. “There’s no nondestructive test for indestructibility.”

— Randall Munroe

20. “Even calling DNA “source code” sells it short – compared to DNA, our most complex programming projects are like pocket calculators.”

— Randall Munroe

21. “Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium and the wolf was like, “dude.”

— Randall Munroe

22. “If every human somehow simply disappeared from the face of the Earth, how long would it be before the last artificial light source would go out?”

— Randall Munroe

23. “The Pauli exclusion principle keeps electrons from getting too close to each other. This effect is one of the main reasons that your laptop doesn’t fall through your lap.”

— Randall Munroe

24. “The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.”

— Randall Munroe

25. “They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.”

— Randall Munroe

26. “I’ve always thought that one of the the great thing about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you.”

— Randall Munroe

27. “If you liked it, then you should have moved a mass inside its Roche limit.”

— Randall Munroe

28. “Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.”

— Randall Munroe

29. “GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it’s one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations.”

— Randall Munroe

30. “Hans Moravec’s book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.”

— Randall Munroe

31. “Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away – I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there – but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.”

— Randall Munroe

32. “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.”

— Randall Munroe

33. “Our most lasting relic will probably be the layer of plastic we’ve deposited across the planet. By digging up oil, processing it into durable and long-lasting polymers, and spreading it across the Earth’s surface, we’ve left a fingerprint that could outlast everything else we do.”

— Randall Munroe

34. “I learned very early on in life that not everyone wants to hear every fact in the world, even if you want to tell them everything you’ve ever read.”

— Randall Munroe

35. “Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.”

— Randall Munroe

36. “What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?”

— Randall Munroe

37. “Laser Pointer Q. If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?”

— Randall Munroe

38. “Centuries from now, deep in concrete vaults, the light from our most toxic waste will still be shining.”

— Randall Munroe

39. “2 Note: If you’re ever trapped with me in a burning building, and I suggest an idea for how we could escape the situation, it’s probably best to ignore me.”

— Randall Munroe

40. “Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?” by Chris Landsea.”

— Randall Munroe

41. “We keep trying to make our units of measurement make sense. But the truth is that the world is an absurd place; why not embrace it? It’s true, unit conversion errors have caused us to lose space probes once in a while. But isn’t that a small price to pay for silliness?”

— Randall Munroe

42. “You could stack the top two rows without much trouble. The third row would burn you with fire. The fourth row would kill you with toxic smoke. The fifth row would do all that stuff PLUS give you a mild dose of radiation. The sixth row would explode violently, destroying the building in a cloud of radioactive, poisonous fire and dust. Do not build the seventh row.”

— Randall Munroe

43. “If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes? – Anonymous.”

— Randall Munroe

44. “That’s one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.”

— Randall Munroe

45. “How fast would a human have to run in order to be cut in half at the bellybutton by a cheese-cutting wire? – Jon Merrill.”

— Randall Munroe

46. “There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.”

— Randall Munroe

47. “Periodic Wall of the Elements Q. What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?”

— Randall Munroe

48. “If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn’t really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.”

— Randall Munroe

49. “If ‘other people have experiences incorrectly’ is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you’re experiencing your life at just the moment you’ve found something you want to remember.”

— Randall Munroe

50. “Speed Bump Q. How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? – Myrlin Barber A. Surprisingly fast. First, a disclaimer. After reading this answer, don’t try to drive over speed bumps at high speeds. Here are some reasons: You could hit and kill someone. It can destroy your tires, suspension, and potentially your entire car. Have you read any of the other answers in this book?”

— Randall Munroe