On Original Ideas

“An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.”

– Stephen Fry

On Offence

“It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what? It’s utterly uninteresting.”

– Stephen Fry

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The sun’s core is so hot that a piece of it the size of a pinhead would give off enough heat to kill a person 160 kilometres away.

As a child, writer and comedian Stephen Fry owned a mouse called Snowball.

According to the Qur’an, Satan himself was left-handed.

The English chemist Sir Humphry Davy was so famous in his lifetime that he once received a letter from Italy addressed simply SIR OMFRE DEVI / LONDRA.

In Latin, ignoring a difference in pronunciation, anus either means ‘anus’ or ‘old woman’.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

My Ass

[An American General (Stephen Fry) is seated at a large desk, smoking a huge cigar: a Stars and Stripes flag hangs behind him.]

General: Jacobson! Get your ass in here right now!
A Colonel (Hugh Laurie) enters, also in uniform.
Colonel: Sir!

General: Jacobson, what the hell am I going to do with your ass?
Colonel: My ass, sir?
General: Can you think of one goddamn reason why I shouldn’t kick your ass all the way back to New Mexico?
Colonel: Well, sir if this concerns…
General: You know what the hell it concerns, Jacobson. It concerns your ass! What does it concern?
Colonel: My ass, sir.

General: Do you recall what it was I said to you the last time you were in this here office?
Colonel: Well sir. You told me to move my ass, and haul my ass, and not to sit on my ass, because if I did, you would personally rearrange my ass.
General: Uh uh. Wrong, Mr Jacobson. I was not going to rearrange your ass – I was going to boil your ass in a bag, and have your ass for breakfast.
Colonel: – Have my ass for breakfast, sir.

General: Read the sign on my desk boy.
Colonel: “The buck stops at my ass.”
General: See, that’s why I have this here star on my shoulder and you don’t. Because my ass is on the line.
Colonel: The bottom line?
General: The bottom line.
Colonel: I understand.

General: Well, I am glad you got your ass straight on that one. Now Jacobson, I’ve got myself a problem.
Colonel: A problem, sir?
General: Yes. It seems that some goddamn college boy on the fifth floor wants a piece of my ass…
Colonel: Your ass, sir?
General: You bet your ass, my ass.

Colonel: Sir?
General: Yes, Jacobson?
Colonel: How does my ass fit into all of this?
General: It’s very simple, Jacobson. You are aware that your ass is mine?
Colonel: It is sir?
General: Oh yes, your ass is mine, mister. The day you joined this man’s army, you signed your ass over to me.

Colonel: I get it, sir.
General: Oh you do, do you?
Colonel: This guy wants a piece of your ass, so you’re thinking that, being as my ass is yours, maybe you could give him a piece of my ass as a way of saving your ass.

General: Jacobson, shut your ass. Nobody likes a smart Alec.

– Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie: A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1989-1995)

On the Need to Mock

“And aren’t we all tired of those who claim to know the answer to life, death and the creation being so fucking sensitive about their knowledge? If I knew the answer to it all, if I thought I understood the wishes of the author of the universe and was privileged to understand what happens to us after death, the last thing I would be is all prickly and defensive. ‘Mock me all you like,’ I’d cry. ‘Go on, laugh your socks off, paint crude daubs, make mocking films. They pass me by as the idle wind which I respect not.’

Whether it is deluded pricks chanting Christian slogans like Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo or deluded pricks chanting Islamic ones like Said and Charif Kouachi in Paris the result is the same: in this breast at least arises even more, as if that were possible, contempt for the dumb, semi-literate, ill-founded, unreasoned drivel that forms the basis of their juvenile, crazed and self-defeating actions.”

– Stephen Fry

Reflection and Occam’s Razor

‘Ned thought for a while. […] ‘Some – I don’t know – some conspiracy brought me here and I need to understand what it was.’
‘We are merely the stars‘ tennis balls, Ned, struck and banded which way please them.’
‘You don’t believe that. You believe in will. You told me so.’
‘Like anyone with a sliver of honesty in them I believe what I find I believe when I wake up each morning. Sometimes I can only think we are determined by the writing in our genes, sometimes it seems to me that we are made or unmade by our upbringings. On better days, it is true that I hope with some conviction that we and we alone make ourselves everything that we are.’
‘Nature, Nurture or Nietzsche in fact.’
‘Ha!’ Babe clapped Ned in the back. ‘It’s coming on, the creature is coming on,’ he boomed to the wide uncomprehending lawn. ‘Listen,’ he said, tucking has arm in Ned’s, ‘if you want to understand your own situation, can you not apply some of the logic it has cost me so much brain blood to teach you? Take out Occam’s Razor and cut away the irrelevant and the obfuscatory. Set down only what you know.’

– Fry. S. 2010. The Stars’ Tennis Balls London, Great Britain: Arrow Books (2014) p. 210-211

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According to the Greek Historian Herodotes, king Xerxes I of Persia had the Dardanelles (also known as the Hellespont) whipped three hundred times and branded with red-hot iron rods for the crime of ‘breaking two bridges’. He also had the architects beheaded.

37% of all the people in the world are either Indian or Chinese.

The longest English name on record is Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. He was a captain in the British Army who died during the First World War in 1917, aged 32.

Bambi, Dizzy, Squiffy, Puddin, Lord Cupid, The Blubberer, Jack Boot, Hubble-Bubble, The Coroner, Stalin, and The Great She-Elephant are all nicknames for British Prime Ministers.

When a Mormon church elder told writer and comedian Stephen Fry he would be reunited with his entire family after death if he become a Mormon, he replied “What happens if you’re good?” He was asked to leave Salt Lake City immediately.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

On Knowledge For Its Own Sake

“It’s an extraordinary thing, it’s always the children who say “sir, sir, what’s the point of geometry or what’s the point of Latin” who end up having no job, being alcoholic and they don’t notice that the ones that actually find knowledge for its own sake and pleasure in information and history and the world and nature around us are actually getting on and doing things with our fucking lives. It’s an odd thing.”

– Stephen Fry