Ken Jennings Quotations

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.

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.

During the whole 'Jeopardy' experience, I felt like I was living a bit of a double life, I would be secretly flying out to L.A. to tape new shows, hoping that none of my coworkers would notice the absence and figure out what was going on. 'Jeopardy' tries very hard to keep their secrets.

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

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

If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.

People are using GPS systems to find millions of little hidden objects throughout the world - often as simple as a piece of Tupperware hidden in the woods. You go to a website, you get the latitude and longitude to get the specific location of a certain specific hiding space, and then you go there and see if you can find it.

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird.

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.

When you see people who are really good at game shows, the one common attribute is a cool head under pressure: an ability to perform as well in the studio, surrounded by lights and noise, as you do on your couch.

For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., wheres theres crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.

The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can't know. And so it's not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in thirty seconds.

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

For some reason the most devoted mapheads seem to be kids.

Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain.

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

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

If it's on the Internet, then it's gotta be true.

It's boring to have the same guy win. I'm actively rooting against myself.

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

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

Marcus is a good floor leader, he's an emotional kid. He and Adam play together and feed off each other so much, they're both good players.

Marcus is a good ballplayer. But he gets to the point where he thinks he has to play the whole game by himself. Then when he tries to get his teammates involved, they kind of let him down. Marcus is an emotional kid.

Most of them (the offers) were 'Where's the check?', whereas John's venture was very well funded and he just wanted me on board... He did a pretty good sales job. His enthusiasm was contagious.

When the timeout was called with 12 seconds to go, I just told them to hang onto the ball, and go to the line. I told them they have to foul. We just get too fast with the ball when we don't have to.

To me, he's the ideal game show host. He has to read 61 questions flawlessly in 22 minutes and keep the game moving for five shows per day.

We got another one today. It's real good when everyone gets in there.

We went into the locker room, and we told them what they needed to do to intensify the pressure. They decided to come out and do it.

Adam is a good ballplayer. He can play ball if he keeps his cool and lets things come to him. We have a tendency to rush too much, and that causes turnovers. But when we let it come to us, we have a good team.

One guy had this can't-miss idea to go dig up old coins at the site of former disused government mints, and he just needed a bit of money to get started ... some guy had an idea for an indoor amusement park.

They (the players) said they wanted a rematch. I told them the only way we could do was we had to play defense. Defense wins games.

They have a better team than they've had in a number of years. They're a good bunch of kids and they have a good coach.

It's about bragging rights for a year. We're both sister schools so we know that's what it all boils down to. Coach and I are real good friends. There's no animosity or anything like that.

Not long after my last win on Jeopardy!, I got a call from the company about this collaboration and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

I once killed a man down south, Alex!

Can You Beat Ken. My experience is that a 15 year old can sometimes know more than his dad. Trivia has an all-age attraction.

I have always loved maps.

I always feel a certain sense of reverence in libraries, even small city ones that smell like homeless internet users.

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.

There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won’t let us look anywhere else in the room if there’s a map on the wall.

I threw the opening pitch at a Blue Jays game, and after the pitch, the mascot asked me if I wanted him to sign the game ball, which I thought was funny. What would he write? "Best Wishes, Some Guy in a Bird Suit"?"

We regret the insinuation that Mr. Alex Trebek is a robot, and has been since 2004. Mr. Trebek's robotic frame does still contain some organic parts, many harvested from patriotic Canadian schoolchildren, so this technically makes him a 'cyborg,' not a 'robot.'

If youre a vegan who ran a marathon & got your dogs from a shelter, how do you decide which thing to wedge into the conversation first?

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.

Twitter makes you a comedian in the same way that digital cameras make you a photographer

There’s just something hypnotic about maps.

The thing you like/are good at is a sacred thing...

I always bring my kids vacation souvenirs printed in Comic Sans, so they know I love them but not unconditionally.

Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.

Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors -- malleable entities like ethnicities, for example -- are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.