Lady Astor: "Winston, if you were my husband I'd poison your tea."
Winston Churchill: "Madam, if you were my wife I'd drink it."

Among other things, Churchill was known for his one-liners.

The phrase "Molon Labe", used as the motto of the Greek First Army Corps and the United States Special Operations Command Central, dates back to the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, where it was the reply Leonidas I of Sparta to Xerxes' demand to lay down their arms.  It translates to "come and take them".

A googolplex ("google" is a deliberate misspelling) is 1010100. If you were to write that out by putting one digit on one electron, you would run out of electrons in the entire universe before you ran out of zeroes to write.  In other words, just writing out the number on a single line would require significantly more space than the universe itself

Sorry, conspiracy buffs -- Atlantis doesn't exist.  Plato made it up.  Which explains why its only reference in antiquity is in one of his books. :)

Parts of Scotland were settled by the Vikings.  So just because someone has Scottish ancestry doesn't mean they're also not a Viking.

(Take that, No True Scotsman!)

You'll find more genetic diversity in a room full of 50 chimpanzees than you will in the entire human species.

Only one medieval western European king ever wrote a book, and that was Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Emperor from 1212-1220.  He wrote a book on falconry.

When he was a teenager, actor Guy Pierce was a bodybuilder.

When Alexander the Great needed to attack Tyre, he was stymied by the fact that Tyre was an island and he had no ships.  So, he built his own bridge from shore to the city, and over the ensuing centuries the bridge has gradually become a permanent feature due to natural processes.  Today, Tyre is no longer an island.

Tradition holds that when choosing a papal name, popes should not choose Peter, for there was only one Pope Peter and he was the first.  Prophecy in the form of the Prophecy of the Popes, attributed to St. Malachy, holds that the final pope will take that name and preside during the destruction of Rome.