"If I could uninvent anything, I would uninvent Hitler's mum, guns and broccoli"
About this Quote
The line’s mechanics are basically a three-beat routine. First beat: “Hitler’s mum” is a deliberately jarring workaround to time-travel ethics, sidestepping the worn “kill Hitler” cliché by targeting origin, not outcome. It’s also darkly comic because it turns monstrous history into domestic causality, as if catastrophe were just a bad parenting pipeline. Second beat: “guns” widens the target from one villain to a system, hinting at a more structural anger - violence as design, not anomaly. Third beat: “broccoli” detonates the solemnity on purpose, yanking the audience back into the realm of everyday dislikes.
As an actor and pop-culture figure, Monaghan’s intent reads less like a policy argument than a personality flare: a quick, quotable mix of righteous outrage and self-deprecation. The subtext is about scale - how we perform seriousness in public, and how comedy becomes a pressure valve when the topic is too massive to hold straight-faced. The cultural context is late-90s/2000s lad-mag banter and talk-show one-liners, where shock adjacency is the currency: say something ethically obvious, then undercut it with something stupid, and you’ve got a meme before memes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Monaghan, Dominic. (2026, January 17). If I could uninvent anything, I would uninvent Hitler's mum, guns and broccoli. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-i-could-uninvent-anything-i-would-uninvent-47288/
Chicago Style
Monaghan, Dominic. "If I could uninvent anything, I would uninvent Hitler's mum, guns and broccoli." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-i-could-uninvent-anything-i-would-uninvent-47288/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If I could uninvent anything, I would uninvent Hitler's mum, guns and broccoli." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-i-could-uninvent-anything-i-would-uninvent-47288/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.








