Ken Jennings Quotes

I have always loved maps.

When you make a decision, you need facts. If those facts are in your brain, they’re at your fingertips. If they’re all in Google somewhere, you may not make the right decision on the spur of the moment.

Knowing lots of answers but being a millisecond slow on the buzzer is indeed very frustrating.

It’s so much fun that the money is just icing on the cake. There seems to be a lot of icing.

Even before you understand them, your brain is drawn to maps.

The future is here.

I can’t relax and sink back in the couch and watch ‘Jeopardy!’ the way I used to.

There’s just something hypnotic about maps.

We don’t realize how hard it was to drive anywhere outside the major cities less than a century ago.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.

Being a nerd really pays off sometimes.

You watch an old ‘Jeopardy!’ and the categories alone are very plain. ‘Poetry,’ or ‘Movies,’ or ‘Physics.’ If you watch it now, though, there’ll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.

I remember one of my last shows, the Final Jeopardy! clue was something like ‘These two boys’ names are top 10 boys’ names in the U.S., they both end with the same letter, and they’re both names of Jesus‘ apostles.’ Now, obviously that’s not a knowable fact.

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

It’s really changed me. For the first time I’m in favor of the Bush tax cuts.

I have condemned my kids to a lifetime of geographic illiteracy.

As Jeopardy devotees know, if you’re trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all. On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it’s just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best.