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“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Lion's Mane

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Science is an organized pursuit of triviality.

Art is a casual pursuit of significance.

Let's keep it in perspective.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Trivia are not knowledge. Lists of facts don't comprise knowledge. Analyzing, hypothesizing, concluding from data, sharing insights, those comprise knowledge. You can't google for knowledge.”
― Elaine Chaika

“I poked him in the chest. 'First of all, yes, it was. Lacy cards and love tokens were widely exchanged even in Victorian times. By now, you should know better than to screw with me on historical trivia.”
― Molly Harper, Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men

“There is no trivia in a strategic mind.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were,--its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make for the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

“I ask why. then remember why most people do most things, and thus find myself introduced - at the tender age of twenty-four - to the sexual kink of mummification.”
― Adam Kay, Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas

“In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school. Instead, I was force-fed a few of Shakespeare's Greatest Hits, although the English needed translation, the broad comedy and wrenching drama were lost, and none of the magnificently dirty jokes were ever explained. (Incidentally, Romeo and Juliet, fully appreciated, might be banned in some U.S. states.) This was the Concordance again, and little more. So we'd read all the lines aloud, resign ourselves to a ponderous struggle, and soon give up the plot completely.”
― Bob Harris, Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

“Ansar is an Arabic term that means helpers or supporters. They were the citizens of Medina who helped Prophet Mohammed upon His arrival to the Holy city. While 'Hussain' is a derivation of 'Hassan' that means 'GOOD' (I also owe this one to Khaled Hosseini).
That's how my favorite character in my debut novel 'When Strangers meet..' gets his name... HUSSAIN ANSARI, because he is the one who helps Jai realize the truth in the story and inspires his son, Arshad, to have FAITH in Allah.”
― K. Hari Kumar, When Strangers meet..

“I mean it, guys," I said. "Why don't you play Two Foot Trivia instead? It's just as fun and much safer."
"First of all, this is completely safe," Grayson replied. "Second, if we had both feet down, we'd just be asking each other trivia questions."
"Which would be lame," added Alex.
"But isn't that what you're doing right now?" I asked.
"No," Grayson said defensively. "Balancing on one foot makes it a sport.”
― James Ponti, Blue Moon

“Education is one of the Grand Christianson Obsessions. They’ve been whole years my mother’s kept us home for intensive private study. As a result of that, Paul will perform the first brain transplant, James will someday build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, Charlie â€� who is an actual musical genius â€� will probably end up writing the Great American Symphony, and I â€� I know a little bit about a lot of things.
I can tell you the chemical composition of the stuff your stick in your hair; how long it would take you, at just under the speed of light, to get to Alpha Centauri â€� and how old your body would be when you finally got there; the middle name of the third president of the United States; the amount of the present budget deficit; the author of the Brothers Karamazov, and how many feet there are in a line of trochaic heptameter. The Little Girl Who Had to Know Why, Paul used to call me. But even my mother couldn’t reconcile me and math.”
― Kristen D. Randle, The Only Alien on the Planet

“So maybe we never would have realized we were so compatible if we hadn't been trading song lyrics and movie dialogue. That's textbook trivia right there."
Mindy looks unconvinced. "But that's how *everybody* gets together. They find some dumb thing they both know a little about that they can talk about until the waiter brings dinner. According to you, there probably isn't a marriage or a relationship or a friendship anywhere today that wasn't jump-started by trivia."
"I think that's exactly right," I agree. "To trivia.”
― Ken Jennings, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

“Not knowing how to get what you want is better than knowing how to get what you do not want.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“This awesome world isn't just a spectator sport. It's symbiotic; it influences us, and we influence it." from A Walk Around the Block (Harper One)”
― Spike carlsen, A Walk Around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day

“Only people who have a world-historical perspective can change history. The average person has only a domestic, ahistorical perspective. Look at social media. It’s full of people without a clue what’s going on. Immense historical forces have been unleashed all around them, and all they care about is posting their brain-dead, vacuous observations and their self-pitying, whining woe-is-me statements about how shitty their lives are and how no one understands them. As well as countless memes and selfies, of course. You just have to love those lolcats on skateboards, right, hoomans? They are forever trapped in their parochial little world of trivia. Why are our books so unsuccessful? It’s because they announce, with the volume of Stentor at Troy, a world-historic agenda, but we are surrounded by pygmies who stare at us like cows in line at the abattoir.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“My brain is like a Snapple cap. It can hold one piece of information at a time.”
― Mike Birbiglia, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

“Though you can get smart from reading everything that a smart person writes, you cannot get famous from reading about everything that a famous person does or is said to have done.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

“As Earl Rognvald of Orkney in in the Orkenyinga Saga (1200 AD) tells us: "I can play at Tafi, Nine skills I know, Rarely I forget the Runes, I know of Books and Smithing, I know how to slide on skis, Shoot and row well enough, Each of the Two arts I know, Harp playing and speaking poetry.”
― Earl Rognvald

“Appeasement was a policy put in place by Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister to try to avert war. His theory was that trying to prevent Germany from getting what it wanted would cause more harm than good in the long run. Therefore Britain’s official foreign policy would be that they would fulfill Germany’s wishes, “provided they appeared legitimate and were not enforced with violence,â€� described in German newspaper Der Spiegel. Chamberlain was aware that the British Empire’s resources were limited and that they really didn’t have the power to stop Hitler. So cooperating with them seemed like a better option.”
― Bill O'Neill, The World War 2 Trivia Book: Interesting Stories and Random Facts from the Second World War

“The British air force desperately needed planes for their military, and the US had lots of planes but couldn’t sell them to the British, because that would count as selling weapons to a country at war. So, the States enlisted the help of their neighbors, Britain’s colony Canada. American pilots flew their planes to the border between Canada and the United States, which was mostly farmland, and landed them in the fields, and left them there. Then overnight Canadian pilots would cross down into the States and tow the planes north into Canadian lands.”
― Bill O'Neill, The World War 2 Trivia Book: Interesting Stories and Random Facts from the Second World War

“In 1935, a British engineer named Robert Watson Watt was asked whether it was possible that the Germans were developing a death ray using radio waves. No such weapon was being made, but in studying the possibility, Watt ended up creating a radar detector, one of the biggest technological advances of WWII.”
― Bill O'Neill, The World War 2 Trivia Book: Interesting Stories and Random Facts from the Second World War

“Used with care, substances that harm neural tissue, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle-solving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around them, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents. After a night of poison. your brain wakes up in the morning saying, “No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Trivia is a fact without a home.”
― Don Rittner

“Some facts are each useful to only one person.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Southwick informs us that a Colonel Townsend of Dublin had the ability to stop his heartbeat at will and 'at last lost his life in the act,' that lightning turns milk sour, and that Adam, of Adam-and-Eve fame, was born on October 28, 4004 B.C. Adam is a Scorpio!”
― Ken Jennings, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

“Thanks to a documentary series on Netflix, I knew that nachos were called nachos because of their inventor's name (Ignacio, nicknamed Nacho). Croissants originated in Australia, not France, a tricky question that knocked all the other teams down... except for Bennett. Thanks to a paper I'd written in college on the history of the celebrity chef, I knew that the first TV celebrity chef was Fanny Cradock in England, not Julia Child, which three of the other teams thought.
Not Bennett, of course. I wondered how he knew about Fanny. She wasn't exactly a household name. At least, not here. If I asked him, he'd probably expound upon a teenage trip to England, where he'd visited the former set.
The first food eaten in space? Applesauce. The first sushi restaurant in New York City? Nippon.”
― Amanda Elliot, Best Served Hot

“I'm telling you, it's Ethereum," Kelsey was spitting, wisps of blond hair going wild around her face. "I am absolutely one hundred percent certain. I was just reading about it literally this morning."
"Ehhh, I still think it's Bitcoin," said Rob One. "I'm invested in a lot of cryptocurrency, so I know. Do you even know what cryptocurrency is?"
If Kelsey were a snake or a vampire, all the Robs would have twin puncture wounds in their throats right about now. "Of course I know what cryptocurrency is," she bit out.
One of the other guys snorted. "Just because you bought a Bitcoin when they became famous doesn't mean you know a lot about it. Go with Bitcoin, guys."
I pounded my palms against the table. All our drinks jumped, and all eyes turned to me.
I didn't even care. "Hey, it's pretty obvious she knows what she's talking about," I said. "Stop being---don't be a dickhole."
"Yeah," said Alice.
The guys were silent for a moment. They didn't know what to say. Kelsey took advantage of their stun to grab the whiteboard, write Ethereum , and hold it up.
"I'm looking for Ethereum," the announcer said. Kelsey laid the whiteboard down on the table with a snap that felt somehow triumphant.”
― Amanda Elliot, Best Served Hot

“On the day I started my self-examination I asked myself these questions: ‘Am I interested in people? Do ideas excite me? Am I knowledgeable enough about novels to write one?â€� I’m sure there were other questions, but I forget them now.
My earliest memories involve being one among many other children, so I did not grow up with a self-centered view of myself, and because of my early jobs I knew a great deal about life. I had knocked about America as a lad, seen Europe in my college years and had been in the Pacific as an adult. But most important, I had always loved people, their histories, the prestigious things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them.
As for ideas on which to base my writing, I was interested in everything—I was a kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner that picked up not only the oddest collection of facts imaginable but also solid material on the basic concerns of life.�
—Chapter XI, “Intellectual Equipmentâ€�, page 297”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home