The Know-It-All Quotes

“Scrabble - The game is available in Braille. That’s a nice fact. This makes me feel better about humanity for some reason. I can’t really explain why.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn’t fucking married.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“philosophy
I studied philosophy for four years. But I'd trade everything I learned for this passage... quoted in the Britannica:
'But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.'
Amen.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“A few weeks later, I’m in a fluorescent-lit classroom in Chelsea awaiting the start of the official Mensa test. I’m sitting next to a guy who’s doing a series of elaborate neck stretches, like we’re about to engage in a vigorous rugby match. He’s neatly laid out four types of gum on his Formica desk: Juicy Fruit, Wrigley Spearmint, Big Red, and Eclipse. I hate this guy. I hope to God he’s not a genius.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“I always thought the name of Utah’s major newspaper was some sort of weird misspelling of the word “desert.” But no, Deseret is the “land of the honeybee,” according to the Book of Mormon. I guess I should have figured they would have caught a typo in the masthead after 154 years.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“If the Britannica has taught me anything, it's to be more careful. I don't want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don't want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don't want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can't have "Jacobs" be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“Huh. I’m not sure how to respond to this. Is Alex Trebek black? He sure doesn’t look black. He looks pretty white to me. He looks like the quintessence, the very incarnation, of whiteness.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“Let me tell you, though: being the smartest boy in the world wasn’t easy. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want this. On the contrary, it was a huge burden. First, there was the task of keeping my brain perfectly protected. My cerebral cortex was a national treasure, a masterpiece of the Sistine Chapel of brains. This was not something that could be treated frivolously. If I could have locked it in a safe, I would have. Instead, I became obsessed with brain damage.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“The literal Greek translation is “school for naked exercise.” Which made toweling off the stationary bike even more important.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“Back to the books. The world’s largest bell was built in 1733 in Moscow, and weighed in at more than four hundred thousand pounds. It never rang—it was broken by fire before it could be struck. What a sad little story. All that work, all that planning, all those expectations—then nothing. Now it just sits there in Russia, a big metallic symbol of failure. I have a moment of silence for the silent bell.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“Lightning goes up. It shoots right up from the ground and into the cloud. This what the encyclopedia says in the section on climate and weather. I reread this passage a couple of times to make sure I hadn't gone batty—but no, lightning goes up.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“Mormons were the first settlers. Not sure Joseph Smith would approve of today’s topless showgirls and liquor. Though he would like the volcano at the Mirage. Everybody likes the volcano.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“claque, aka canned laughter It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s nothing new under the sun (a heavenly body, by the way, that some Indian ascetics stare at till they go blind). I knew that some things had a history—the Constitution, rhythm and blues, Canada—but it’s the odd little things that surprise me with their storied past. This first struck me when I was reading about anesthetics and I learned that, in the early 1840s, it became fashionable to hold parties where guests would inhale nitrous oxide out of bladders. In other words, Whip-it parties! We held the exact same kind of parties in high school. We’d buy fourteen cans of Reddi-Wip and suck on them till we had successfully obliterated a couple of million neurons and face-planted on my friend Andy’s couch. And we thought we were so cutting edge. And now, I learn about claque, which is essentially a highbrow French word for canned laughter. Canned laughter was invented long before Lucille Ball stuffed chocolates in her face or Ralph Kramden threatened his wife with extreme violence. It goes back to the 4th century B.C., when Greek playwrights hired bands of helpers to laugh at their comedies in order to influence the judges. The Romans also stacked the audience, but they were apparently more interested in applause than chuckles: Nero—emperor and wannabe musician—employed a group of five thousand knights and soldiers to accompany him on his concert tours. But the golden age of canned laughter came in 19th-century France. Almost every theater in France was forced to hire a band called a claque—from claquer, “to clap.” The influential claque leaders, called the chefs de claque, got a monthly payment from the actors. And the brilliant innovation they came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, “This is the good part.” And my favorite of all, the pleureuses, women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I’m not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. You’d be watching an ER episode, and a softball player would come in with a bat splinter through his forehead, and you’d hear a little whimper in the background, turning into a wave of sobs. Julie already has trouble keeping her cheeks dry, seeing as she cried during the Joe Millionaire finale. If they added canned crying, she’d be a mess.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

“I've even come to a conclusion that would get me blackballed from ever setting foot in liberal education circles again. That is this: colonialism wasn't 100 percent evil. More like 96 percent evil. Sometimes the colonizing culture actually made moral improvements in the native culture. I came to this conclusion while reading about the abolition of the Indian custom of widow burning. In pre-British India, a man's widow was burned alongside his corpse. The British colonialists put a stop to that. So yes, they criminally oppressed an entire people. But like a robber who fills up the ice trays while he steals the TV, they did a smidgeon of good.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“Reading Encyclopaedia Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“I know the name of Turkey's leading avant-guard publication. I know that John Quincy Adams married for money. I know that Bud Abbott was a double-crosser, that absentee ballots are very popular in Ireland, and that dwarves have prominent buttocks.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“(Incidentally, the modern marathon gets its distance—26 miles and 385 yards—because the British Olympic committee in 1908 wanted it to go from Windsor Castle to the Royal Box in London Stadium”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

“Leonardo Pisano, aka Fibonacci: Fibonacci was a 13th-century Italian mathematician who invented the Fibonacci series, which goes like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. Each of the numbers is the sum of the two preceding numbers. I look at the sequence again. I know I recognize it from somewhere. It takes me a couple of seconds, but then it clicks: Boggle! It's the scoring system for my favorite find-a-word game, Boggle.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“I like uncovering the cultural prejudices I didn't even know.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“My growing collection of facts keeps overlapping with my life.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“One of my biggest challenges is figuring out how to shoehorn my newfound knowledge into conversations.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“The author jokes that the culture at his first job at Entertainment Weekly chased away the worthwhile aspects of his Brown education, but in so doing he makes a subtle point about the profound impact of the culture with which we surround ourselves and how easily we can be defined and constrained by our jobs.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

“Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line—right-to-left, then left-to-right. Brilliant! The eye doesn’t waste time trekking back to the left side of the page after every line.”
― A.J. Jacobs, The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World