Top 180 Randall Munroe Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Magnitude -15 A drifting mote of dust coming to rest on a table Sometimes it’s nice not to destroy the world for a change.”

— Randall Munroe

102. “In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots – or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal – it would probably take no more effort than walking.”

— Randall Munroe

103. “Just watch out for salmonella. And the Andromeda Strain.”

— Randall Munroe

104. “A world of random soul mates would be a lonely one. Let’s hope that’s not what we live in.”

— Randall Munroe

105. “If we divide up the world’s land area evenly, there’s enough room for each of us to have a little over 2 hectares each, with the nearest person 77 meters away.”

— Randall Munroe

106. “It would blast the material out of the way with powerful shockwaves, leaving a trail of superhot plasma behind it. This would be something never before seen in the history of the universe: an underground shooting star.”

— Randall Munroe

107. “News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.”

— Randall Munroe

108. “I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you’ve just bricked something important because you didn’t pay enough attention to a loose wire.”

— Randall Munroe

109. “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

110. “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

111. “So, as far as swimming safety goes, the bottom line is that you’d probably be OK, as long as you didn’t dive to the bottom or pick up anything strange. But just to be sure, 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

112. “Gravity in low Earth orbit is almost as strong as gravity on the surface. The Space Station hasn’t escaped Earth’s gravity at all; it’s experiencing about 90 percent the pull that we feel on the surface.”

— Randall Munroe

113. “For a small smartphone charger, if it’s not warm to the touch, it’s using less than a penny a year. This is true of almost any powered device.1.”

— Randall Munroe

114. “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. The cold of Titan is just an engineering problem. With the right refitting, and the right heat sources, a Cessna 172 could fly on Titan – and so could we.”

— Randall Munroe

115. “A new milestone: The hair dryer is now, impossibly, consuming more power than every other electrical device on the planet combined.”

— Randall Munroe

116. “The amount of power in question, 700 watts, is about a horsepower, so if you want to boil tea in two minutes, you’ll need at least one horse to stir it hard enough.”

— Randall Munroe

117. “Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They’d want to join the club, so they’d get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They’d marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family.”

— Randall Munroe

118. “On the other hand, if you jumped off Ireland’s 210-meter Cliffs of Moher, you would be able to fall for only about eight seconds – or a little more, if the updrafts were strong. That’s not very long, but according to River Tam, given adequate vacuuming systems it might be enough time to drain all the blood from your body.”

— Randall Munroe

119. “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. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting, directly or indirectly, from information contained in this book.”

— Randall Munroe

120. “Yes, “centrifugal.” I will fight you.”

— Randall Munroe

121. “Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.”

— Randall Munroe

122. “A 1-watt laser is an extremely dangerous thing. It’s not just powerful enough to blind you – it’s capable of burning skin and setting things on fire.”

— Randall Munroe

123. “X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast.”

— Randall Munroe

124. “Suppose you’re meeting a friend in an American town that neither of you have been to before. You don’t have a chance to plan a meeting place beforehand. Where do you go?”

— Randall Munroe

125. “Trees make babies by dropping tiny wooden tree eggs on the ground.”

— Randall Munroe

126. “If you set out a cup of warm water on Mars, it’ll try to boil, freeze, and sublimate, practically all at once. Water on Mars seems to want to be in any state except liquid.”

— Randall Munroe

127. “I mean, I guess it’s just me who argues that; but I’m very vocal.”

— Randall Munroe

128. “At supersonic and hypersonic speeds, a shockwave forms around the steak that helps protect it from the faster and faster winds. The exact characteristics of this shock front – and thus the mechanical stress on the steak – depend on how an uncooked 8-ounce filet tumbles at hypersonic speeds. I searched the literature, but was unable to find any research on this.”

— Randall Munroe

129. “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.”

— Randall Munroe

130. “This means the last few years of hard-drive production – which, thanks to increasing size, represents the majority of global storage capacity – would just about fill an oil tanker. So, by that measure, the Internet is smaller than an oil tanker.”

— Randall Munroe

131. “Q. Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? – Rob B A. I WAS SORT OF surprised to find that the answer was yes! But to really do it right, you’ll want to talk to the Russians.”

— Randall Munroe

132. “Cook’s The Science of Good Cooking was also helpful.”

— Randall Munroe

133. “The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.”

— Randall Munroe

134. “But maybe it won’t. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.”

— Randall Munroe

135. “I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions.”

— Randall Munroe

136. “Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.”

— Randall Munroe

137. “If 10 percent of them are close to your age, that would be around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you would find true love only in one lifetime out of 10,000.”

— Randall Munroe

138. “Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?”

— Randall Munroe

139. “Given humanity’s current knowledge and capabilities, is it possible to build a new star?”

— Randall Munroe

140. “Of the 28 people killed by lightning in the US in 2012, 13 were standing under or near trees.”

— Randall Munroe

141. “Without us, Earth’s geology will grind on.”

— Randall Munroe

142. “Cheaper trade: Time zones make trade more expensive; it’s harder to do business with someone if their office hours don’t overlap with yours. If the Sun went out, it would eliminate the need for time zones, allowing us to switch to UTC and give a boost to the global economy.”

— Randall Munroe

143. “In a billion years, Earth will become a second Venus.”

— Randall Munroe

144. “Could you boil tea if you just stirred it hard enough? No. The first problem is power. The amount of power in question, 700 watts, is about a horsepower, so if you want to boil tea in two minutes, you’ll need at least one horse to stir it hard enough.”

— Randall Munroe

145. “Okay, you can stop looking at your hand now.”

— Randall Munroe

146. “Statistically, your first neutrino interaction probably happens somewhere around age ten.”

— Randall Munroe

147. “As Tim Minchin put it in his song “If I Didn’t Have You”: Your love is one in a million; You couldn’t buy it at any price. But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves, Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.”

— Randall Munroe

148. “Our most lasting relic will probably be the layer of plastic we’ve deposited across the planet.”

— Randall Munroe

149. “Maybe we’ll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence.”

— Randall Munroe

150. “Eventually, humans will die out. Nobody knows when,12 but nothing lives forever.”

— Randall Munroe