Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Randall Munroe, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Randall Munroe quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 135 Randall Munroe quotes for you to read and share.
Thin Burning Light Gun
If the car found life, it could try to use this gun to learn about it, but the life might not be alive when it was done. -- Randall Munroe
The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field,7 the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards.8 -- Randall Munroe
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
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
For starters, would your soul mate even still be alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93 percent mortality rate). If we were all paired up at random, 90 percent of our soul mates would be long dead. -- Randall Munroe
I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
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
If you take neutron star material outside of the crushing gravity well where it's normally found, it will re-expand into superhot normal matter with an outpouring of energy more powerful than any nuclear weapon. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
People often wonder whether we could harvest electrical power from lightning. -- Randall Munroe
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
I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
A. Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting. -- Randall Munroe
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
Falling from great heights is dangerous.[citation needed] A balloon could -- Randall Munroe
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
The upshot is: 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. The -- Randall Munroe
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
I'm not sure why we romanticize 'young love,' or love in general ... It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you. -- Randall Munroe
Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously. -- Randall Munroe
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
The most common genetic disorder caused by inbreeding is spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). SMA causes the death of the cells in the spinal cord, and is often fatal or severely disabling. -- Randall Munroe
Child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage. The parent would have all the genes the child would, but the child wouldn't have all the genes -- Randall Munroe
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
The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians. -- Randall Munroe
Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares. -- Randall Munroe
But this is where it gets weird. The mole planet would be a giant sphere of meat. -- Randall Munroe
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
Charles had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254, making him slightly more inbred than a child of two siblings (0.250). He suffered from extensive physical and emotional disabilities, and was a strange (and largely ineffective) king. -- Randall Munroe
If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
I mean, I guess it's just me who argues that; but I'm very vocal. -- Randall Munroe
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
It's not that the wind is blowing, it's what the wind is blowing. -- Randall Munroe
That's one in 27 quinquatrigintillion. -- Randall Munroe
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
Cook's The Science of Good Cooking was also helpful. -- Randall Munroe
Hans Moravec's book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. -- Randall Munroe
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
A world of random soul mates would be a lonely one. Let's hope that's not what we live in. -- Randall Munroe
Maybe civilization will collapse, we'll all succumb to disease and famine, and the last of us will be eaten by cats. Maybe we'll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence. There's no way to know. -- Randall Munroe
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
Q. This may be a bit gruesome, but ... if someone's DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last? -- Randall Munroe
Problem Boats
We keep extra boats stuck to these doors for people to use if there's a problem that makes them not want to be in space anymore, but no one will come get them. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
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
If humans escape the solar system and outlive the Sun, our descendants may someday live on one of these planets. Atoms from Times Square, cycled through the heart of the Sun, will form our new bodies. One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers. -- Randall Munroe
Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty. -- Randall Munroe
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
Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world? -- Randall Munroe
Okay, you can stop looking at your hand now. -- Randall Munroe
You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right. -- Randall Munroe
So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble - though it would definitely be green. -- Randall Munroe
Plausible that a professional pitcher with some time to practice could throw a golf ball faster than a baseball. -- Randall Munroe
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
A child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage. -- Randall Munroe
That's if everything goes as planned. -- Randall Munroe
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
If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince? -- Randall Munroe
Self-fertilization is a risky strategy, which is why sex is so popular among large and complex organisms. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
Manhattan has been continuously inhabited for the past 3000 years, and was first settled by humans perhaps 9000 years ago. -- Randall Munroe
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
I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express. -- Randall Munroe
Eventually, they give up, and the unexplained meteorological phenomenon is simply called a "dubstep storm," because - in the words of one researcher - "It had one hell of a drop. -- Randall Munroe
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
I like it when things catch fire and explode, which means I do not have your best interests in mind. -- Randall Munroe
Burning selenium can make sulfur smell like Chanel. -- Randall Munroe
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
Eventually, humans will die out. Nobody knows when,12 but nothing lives forever. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
(not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction). To -- Randall Munroe
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
THE RICHTER SCALE, WHICH has technically been replaced by the "moment magnitude"1 scale, measures the energy released by an earthquake. -- Randall Munroe
The thing about the Internet is that you can write something ... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it. -- Randall Munroe
One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.' -- Randall Munroe
We'd end up with a mole planet slightly larger than the Moon. -- Randall Munroe
The Mars rover Curiosity, for example, is powered by the heat from a chunk of plutonium it carries in a container on the end of a stick. -- Randall Munroe
what year did a single typical desktop computer surpass the combined processing power of humanity? 1994. -- Randall Munroe
The whole process of claiming a colony (on land already occupied by other people) is awfully arbitrary in the first place. Essentially, the British built their empire by sailing around and sticking flags on random beaches. -- Randall Munroe
Of the 28 people killed by lightning in the US in 2012, 13 were standing under or near trees. -- Randall Munroe
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
Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a collection of particles. -- Randall Munroe
Trees make babies by dropping tiny wooden tree eggs on the ground. -- Randall Munroe
Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you. -- Randall Munroe
A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them. -- Randall Munroe
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
If you liked it, then you should have moved a mass inside its Roche limit. -- Randall Munroe
Mutations pop up all over the place, but our redundant chromosomes help blunt this effect. By avoiding inbreeding, a population reduces the odds that rare and harmful mutations will pop up at the same place on both sides of the chromosome. -- Randall Munroe
How many houses are burned down in the United States every year? What would be the easiest way to increase that number by a significant amount (say, at least 15%)? -- Randall Munroe
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
The US isn't a perfect model of the world, -- Randall Munroe
Two magnitude 9+ earthquakes this century both altered the length of the day by a tiny fraction of a second. -- Randall Munroe
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
Maybe we'll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
REENTERING SPACECRAFT HEAT UP because they're compressing the air in front of them (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction). -- Randall Munroe
To occasional heat waves - ice in the Martian soil occasionally melts and flows as a liquid. -- Randall Munroe
But what kind of person makes tea in a blender? -- Randall Munroe
This would be something never before seen in the history of the universe: an underground shooting star. -- Randall Munroe
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
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
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
Introverts understand; the loneliest human in history was just happy to have a few minutes of peace and quiet. -- Randall Munroe
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
I still don't know whether there are more hard or soft things in the world, -- Randall Munroe
Yes, "centrifugal." I will fight you. -- Randall Munroe
computers are limited by our ability to program them, so we've got a built-in advantage. Instead, -- Randall Munroe
There's a thing about being alone and there's a thing about being lonely, and they're two different things. -- Randall Munroe
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
neutrino radiation -- Randall Munroe
In a billion years, Earth will become a second Venus. -- Randall Munroe
What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? - Thomas Bennett (and many others) -- Randall Munroe
Your brain - not accustomed to nonuniform gravities - thinks you're standing on a gentle slope. -- Randall Munroe
Actually, what I'm confused about is how. -- Randall Munroe
The Moon would shine as brightly as the midmorning sun, and by the end of the two minutes, the lunar regolith would be heated to a glow. -- Randall Munroe
Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch," and would be eligible to advance to first base. -- Randall Munroe
A darkened Sun would liberate us from the parsnip threat. -- Randall Munroe
There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived. -- Randall Munroe
If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes? - Anonymous -- Randall Munroe
To DNA, our most complex programming projects are like pocket calculators. -- Randall Munroe
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
I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions. -- Randall Munroe
much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts -- Randall Munroe
On to the sixth row! No matter how careful you are, the sixth row would definitely kill you. -- Randall Munroe