Top 180 Randall Munroe Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan.”

— Randall Munroe

53. “It’s tempting to just write a comic called ‘Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks’ – maybe it would work, and I could just close down the ‘xkcd’ store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.”

— Randall Munroe

54. “To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the tenth story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.”

— Randall Munroe

55. “Do not build the seventh row.”

— Randall Munroe

56. “From 1960 into the 21st century, Pennsylvania has voted for five different people named Bob Casey.”

— Randall Munroe

57. “At the top of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas is the most powerful spotlight on Earth.”

— Randall Munroe

58. “The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.”

— Randall Munroe

59. “The universe is probably littered with one-planet graves.”

— Randall Munroe

60. “Rule of thumb: One person per square meter is a light crowd, four people per square meter is a mosh pit. 2.”

— Randall Munroe

61. “There are hopes that carbon nanotube-based materials could provide the required strength – adding this to the long list of engineering problems that can be waved away by tacking on the prefix “nano-.”

— Randall Munroe

62. “Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature – which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I’m thinking that maybe we’ll have a future where Google is ‘xkcd.’”

— Randall Munroe

63. “It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.”

— Randall Munroe

64. “Longbow archers can fire eight to ten arrows per minute. In physics terms, a longbow archer is an arrow generator with a frequency of 150 millihertz.”

— Randall Munroe

65. “A magnitude 15 earthquake would involve the release of almost 1032 joules of energy, which is roughly the gravitational binding energy of the Earth. To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan.”

— Randall Munroe

66. “Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard’s Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what’s already here.”

— Randall Munroe

67. “Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize its the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world?”

— Randall Munroe

68. “DISCLAIMER Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.”

— Randall Munroe

69. “Sometimes it’s nice not to destroy the world for a change.”

— Randall Munroe

70. “How much computing power could we could achieve if the entire world population stopped whatever we are doing right now and started doing calculations? How would it compare to a modern-day computer or smartphone?”

— Randall Munroe

71. “Oooh, look at me, I looked up a quote!”

— Randall Munroe

72. “Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.”

— Randall Munroe

73. “Plumes of hot meat and bubbles of trapped gases like methane – along with the air from the lungs of the deceased moles – would periodically rise through the mole crust and erupt volcanically from the surface, a geyser of death blasting mole bodies free of the planet.”

— Randall Munroe

74. “Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty.”

— Randall Munroe

75. “A child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage.”

— Randall Munroe

76. “In the Clarendon Library at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.”

— Randall Munroe

77. “In conclusion, if the Sun went out, we would see a variety of benefits across many areas of our lives. Are there any downsides to this scenario? We would all freeze and die.”

— Randall Munroe

78. “Q. How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?”

— Randall Munroe

79. “You might notice that we’re ignoring the pockets of space between the moles. In a moment, you’ll see why.”

— Randall Munroe

80. “Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a collection of particles.”

— Randall Munroe

81. “Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn’t my house is mentally helpful: ‘This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,’ and ’over there is the place where I do the dishes.”

— Randall Munroe

82. “A. Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting.”

— Randall Munroe

83. “The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians.”

— Randall Munroe

84. “As far as I know, this steak question originally came up in a lengthy 4chan thread, which quickly disintegrated into poorly informed physics tirades intermixed with homophobic slurs. There was no clear conclusion.”

— Randall Munroe

85. “No place on Earth has constant lightning, but there’s an area in Venezuela that comes close. Near the southwestern edge of Lake Maracaibo, there’s a strange phenomenon: perpetual nighttime thunderstorms. There are two spots, one over the lake and one over land to the west, where thunderstorms form almost every night. These storms can generate a flash of lightning every two seconds, making Lake Maracaibo the lightning capital of the world.”

— Randall Munroe

86. “Q. What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface? – Jonathan Bastien-Filiatrault A. Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.”

— Randall Munroe

87. “I like it when things catch fire and explode, which means I do not have your best interests in mind.”

— Randall Munroe

88. “This quote is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.”

— Randall Munroe

89. “But this is where it gets weird. The mole planet would be a giant sphere of meat.”

— Randall Munroe

90. “I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.”

— Randall Munroe

91. “I think the comic that’s gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles – normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.”

— Randall Munroe

92. “IF YOU WANT TO transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the Internet. This isn’t a new idea – it’s often dubbed “SneakerNet” – and it’s even how Google transfers large amounts of data internally.”

— Randall Munroe

93. “Project Orion, is detailed in the excellent book of the same name by Freeman’s son, George.”

— Randall Munroe

94. “Anyone who says that they’re great at communicating but ‘people are bad at listening’ is confused about how communication works.”

— Randall Munroe

95. “Q. How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backward into the net?”

— Randall Munroe

96. “By choosing the right words, you can take an idea that’s happening in your head and try to make an idea like it happen in someone else’s. That’s what’s happening right now.”

— Randall Munroe

97. “What if every day, every human had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a human?”

— Randall Munroe

98. “If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?”

— Randall Munroe

99. “It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles at hurricanes.”

— Randall Munroe

100. “I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”

— Randall Munroe