[About the number of kisses given as a greeting in certain regions]
And 5 is Corsica, I suppose...
5?! They really have very little to do in Corsica do they?
Can you tell me what sort of person kisses 5 times? "Cors-i-can!"
All S1
S1 E15Unfinished Business
If you're unsure about whether to do one cheek or two, best way to deal with it is to cup their genitals while you're doing it, and they won't mind how many kisses.
[laughing] Cup their genitals! After the words "Carry your bag, sir?"
How would you describe the famous Thatcher effect?
Yes. You get the country to bend over, and you give it one till its eyes water.
It was great actually when she became Lady Thatcher, because then she sounded like a device removing pubic hair.
[About the Mona Lisa]
The University of Amsterdam used emotion recognition software to analyse the famous enigmatic smile.
Or looked at her. "Emotion recognition software"? I don't know. My money's on "bored." What do you reckon?
It showed that it was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry. She was less than 1% neutral and not even a quarter of one percent surprised.
Sounds like a breakdown of the audience.
RDReginald D. Hunter
I was at a party here, and this guy was telling me about when he wore corduroy, and he says, "You're an American, do you know what corduroy is?" And I said, "No." And he went on to try and explain it, and eventually four or five people were around me, drunk, trying to explain to me what corduroy was. And eventually this girl who we didn't notice left the room, and she went upstairs to her apartment, and she just dashed in the room with a corduroy jacket, "Here! This is what it is! This is what it is!" And you know, I just … I went along with it because there's nothing like the warm look on white people's faces when they feel like they're teaching you something.
My grandfather was a Hungarian Jew, he said "A Hungarian is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first."
[on that London is not the city with the most Michelin stars in the world]
RDReginald D. Hunter
I feel that any country that can produce marmite, they started later than everybody else in trying to make food taste good.
This from a country that has spray-on cheese?
My name is Stephen "My Bottom Is a Treasure-house" Fry; Thank you and good night.
[to the camera] If you are watching QI now, and you believe in astrology, you are banned from watching in future. You are not allowed; you must turn it over now. Thank you.
They had vacuum cleaners in America in the 19th century, and they were huge, and they had to go on the back of a car drawn by horses.
[pedantic] I remember seeing that on a programme called QI! ...But well remembered!
Now. Picture the scene. I'm out windsurfing. The breeze is ruffling my trousers and sun-bleached hair. I look up, and I see on the horizon a ship. How far away is it?
Twenty-one miles.
No.
I thought it was always twenty-one miles.
No.
I didn't even get flagged for that.
No, no, I didn't know that anybody always thought that it was twenty-one miles.
[pointing to the red flower in his buttonhole] What does my buttonhole tell you about me?
That you're a closet heterosexual?
How dare you!
[After discussing how the heroine of La Dame aux Camélias wore a red camellia instead of a white one to indicate when she was on her period]
And the film based on La Dame aux Camélias is …?
Carry On Menstruating.
Do you know the difference between a frog and a toad?
Spelling.
What do you call a slug with a shell?
I’m not falling for that one.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's QI pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.