Top 40 Ken Jennings Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Self-esteem is important because it sets up a powerful cycle of personal growth and willingness to take risks.”

— Ken Jennings

Featured in: Personal Growth Quotes

2. “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.”

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

4. “In his book Why Geography Matters, the geographer Harm de Blij argues that the West’s three great challenges of our time – Islamist terrorism, global warming, and the rise of China – are all problems of geography. An informed citizenry has to understand place, not because place is more important than other kinds of knowledge but because it forms the foundation for so much other knowledge.”

— Ken Jennings

5. “It’s boring to have the same guy win. I’m actively rooting against myself.”

— Ken Jennings

6. “There’s just something hypnotic about maps.”

— Ken Jennings

7. “One of the most significant barriers to progress is the lack of effective leadership.”

— Ken Jennings

8. “I have always loved maps.”

— Ken Jennings

9. “Being a nerd really pays off sometimes.”

— Ken Jennings

10. “If it’s on the Internet, then it’s gotta be true.”

— Ken Jennings

11. “Trivia is mainstream. ‘Nerd’ is the new ’cool.”

— Ken Jennings

12. “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.”

— Ken Jennings

13. “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.’”

— Ken Jennings

14. “The commercial break before Final Jeopardy is usually the only time that the show stops tape. You’re given as long as you want to do the math required to make your wager.”

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

16. “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.”

— Ken Jennings

17. “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.”

— Ken Jennings

18. “In general your brain stretches out time when there’s a lot going on. That’s why time seems to pass more slowly in childhood than it does in adulthood – because kids are doing so many new things for the first time. If you want to have a longer-seeming life, that’s the secret... Keep trying lots of new things, and enjoy each moment!”

— Ken Jennings

19. “Trivia, as I’ve said before, shouldn’t really be called “trivia.” Facts about history, geography, books, movies, music – this is the stuff that used to be called good old-fashioned “general knowledge,” the stuff that everybody was supposed to remember from school, regardless of their career niche. We lost something the more we specialized – it started to drain away this vast pool of information that everybody knew. Knowledge was what connected us, and now it distinguishes us.”

— Ken Jennings

20. “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.”

— Ken Jennings

21. “Your butt may like to sit, but your butt is not the boss of you! Say no to your butt.”

— Ken Jennings

22. “I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.”

— Ken Jennings

23. “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.”

— Ken Jennings

24. “I feel about Flannery O’Connor the same way that terrible people feel about Ayn Rand.”

— Ken Jennings

25. “Getting your ego out of the way has an even deeper organizational impact.”

— Ken Jennings

26. “There were two problems with this idea. First, it led to crappy “virtual reality” movies like Virtuosity and The Lawnmower Man. And second, in the long run, it turned out to be totally wrong.”

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

28. “If you never open a map until you’re lost, you’re missing out on all the fun.”

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

30. “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.”

— Ken Jennings

31. “When a leader keeps personal ego in check it builds the confidence and self-esteem of others.”

— Ken Jennings

32. “Twitter makes you a comedian in the same way that digital cameras make you a photographer.”

— Ken Jennings

33. “To serve the many, you first serve the few.”

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

35. “In this country, we were not into detail. Europe developed detail.” “Why do you think that is?” “Weather. The whole history of England consists of finding things to do out of the weather. Which tells you why Russia was even worse. That’s why Russian novels have 182 characters: bad weather.”

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

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

— Ken Jennings

40. “Every day we forget stories. I saw a funny video about a cat on the Internet this morning, but when I tried to tell a friend about it, I suddenly had no idea how it ended.”

— Ken Jennings