Penn Jillette Quotes

I didn't learn fire-eating to conquer my fears. I learned fire-eating because I desperately wanted to be in show business.

I'm not misunderstood. I am brash. I make my living being brash.

Modern American magic, late 20th century magic, is tremendously disrespectful of the audience.

In music, if you hit a wrong note, people forgive you. In magic when something goes wrong, the entire art is destroyed.

Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.

There is no god." I've said that sentence on Glenn Beck's TV show in front of his live audience at his studio in the Texas Bible Belt. I've told Republicans that I like immigrants. I've told Democrats that I dig rich people. I've told sane people that I like lawyers. But

I don't want people who are in poverty, in pain, or suffering, to suffer because it's for their own good and they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I want to help them. I want us all to help them.

The medium is not the message - the message is the message.

It is really funny to see people that you know acting unpleasantly just because there are TV cameras on.

Only Atheists have morals, the religious have reward and punishment. That's not morality, that's sucking up.

'Celebrity Apprentice' has more integrity and is the most straightforward show I've ever seen.

Whereas you have someone like Houdini, who works really, really hard to get really, really famous, and then has actual intellectual ideas that he puts into the culture that stay there.

The most important part of life is work, it's the flow, it's getting stuff done, feeling like you're doing something.

The skills that we have are the actual magic skills - not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don't get to use again.

I have a very specific definition of censorship. Censorship must be done by the government or it's not censorship.

For better or worse, in the 21st century, reality shows are the variety show.

Twelve magicians and two carnies have been shot dead doing the bullet catch. That's cool enough, but every night when we close our show with that trick and the loaded gun gets pointed in my face, it goes so far beyond cool. All I can think is 12 magicians, two carnies.

You can't believe how pro-gay and pro-freedom-of-speech I am. I'm way out beyond anyone on the Left.

I'm always surprised when the corporate world does stupid things, because they're often not very stupid in hindsight.

Freedom means the freedom to be stupid, and that's what I want.

For the most part, any serious magic show is not using very much technology newer than theatrical lights.

If you've gotten yourself into a situation when Clay Aiken is going to talk about his feelings with you, it's time to kill yourself.

Bob Barr is not crazy enough for my taste.

Comedy is taken care of by a free market.

I'm totally against straight marriage - even though I'm married. I don't think heterosexual marriage is any of the government's business.

When I buy Windows 98, I'm not only buying something useful, I'm giving money to Bill Gates, which is a really good thing.

In reality, many people let go of religion later in life.

Desire for something impossible does not make it less impossible.

Cars mean nothing to me. I'm not a car guy.

I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world - and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more.

When I was 15, 16, 17 years old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games.

Meeting our audiences, or at least the members of the audience who would like to meet us, makes us different from other entertainers. We aren't scared of our audiences. We've learned that the crowds that other entertainers might hate - the quiet crowds - include many people who are loving the show. I love quiet crowds now; I don't see them as lacking enthusiasm, I see them as paying attention. We've learned that a joke that didn't get a loud laugh might be someone's favorite line.

Even if I disagree with Obama on many, many things, he is certainly qualified to be president. He is certainly competent to be president.

You don't have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is "I don't know".

When someone is trying to interpret something for you, they always have an agenda.

I will not counter the insanity of the PATRIOT Act with an overblown fear of my rights being taken away.

I read a lot of books to my children, and they all seem really good. I think people have gotten really good at children's books.

TCA pretends to be about raising money for charity. That's true, but only so far. If I had not taken time off from the Penn & Teller show to do The Celebrity Apprentice - if Teller and I had just done our show, gotten usual pay - I could have donated four times the amount of money that Trump had pledged to give my charity if I won the whole damn shooting match. Opportunity Village, "my" charity that helps intellectually disabled adults to enter society, got a lot of attention because I was on The Celebrity Apprentice, and that does count for something. And when I was "fired," my real bosses at Caesars, who own the Rio and the Penn & Teller Theater, said, "Oh, you wanted a quarter million for Opportunity Village? We don't have to do some jive TV show; we'll just write a check." They wrote the full winning amount to Opportunity Village and everyone was happy.

It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that life and the love of your real friends and family is more than enough to make life worth living. Isn't it much sadder to feel that there is a more important love required than the love of the people who have chosen to spend their limited time with you?

I'm totally clean and sober my whole life.

Love and respect all people. Hate and destroy all faith.

You should think about the world and feel about your heart.

Cheerios bring back memories. I actually don't think I ate them much as a kid, though; maybe it's some sort of Jungian memory, I don't know. But they have so much sugar, it's great.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He's about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There'd be riots in the streets about the people we're killing. And yet because it's Obama, and he's better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.

Obama is a great leader. He can fire people up and get them to do what he wants.

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

We celebrities are desperate pigs.

Technology is run by sex, because it's very important to people, both technology and sex.

It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.

The only secret of magic is that I'm willing to work harder on it than you think it's worth.

I don't believe the majority always knows what's best for everyone.

Magic is the Special Olympics of entertainment.

What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you say "I believe there's an all-powerful force of love in the universe that connects us all, and I have no evidence of that but I believe it in my heart," then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that Sharon Tate deserves to die. It's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that you need to fly planes into buildings for Allah.

If I go out to dinner with you and you order wine, I leave. I won't be around drugs and alcohol at all.

If you don't pay your taxes and you don't answer the warrant and you don't go to court, eventually someone will pull a gun. Eventually someone with a gun will show up. I want everything the government does to be done, I just want it to be done voluntarily.

I grew up as a Christian. I suppose at some level I wanted to believe someone was watching over me.

You have no chance of scaring me with death, all the fear possible is contained in life.

I don't think anything gives your life joy and meaning. I think your life simply has joy and meaning. The love for my children, the love for my parents and the love for my friends is the end in itself. The meaning is life.

If you spend a lot of time lying to people, you think a lot about what the truth means.

In my private life, I'm not around any drugs or alcohol.

Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people. We have no proof that the bad, stupid crazy people who have planted bombs in the past few years used the phone much for their stupid bad crimes, let alone logged on the Internet. Yet when those kind of bad things happen nowadays, the government tries to do bad things to phones and the Net. The phones and the Internet are just good smart things, and the government should leave them alone. You have to watch the government all the time on everything. Thomas Jefferson didn't say that, but he said something very close to that.

I have no evidence that libertarianism leads to a better life. I just think it is morally right.

Poker would have never gotten on TV when we only had three networks.

The fact is that violence gives you a rush.

If you are doing something for reward or punishment, you do not have morality.

I don't want everyone to read anything; I like us all reading different books.

You can't allow people freedom and then change your mind when the things don't go your way.

The end never justifies the means because there is no end; there are only means.

A lot of older parents worry about being older parents. I hear people say, 'I don't want to be too old to play baseball with my son.' They worry that their kids will be embarrassed by their parents' age.

Mentally ill people come from all belief systems.

We knew that we were kind of odd and creeps, and we wanted to do odd, creepy stuff for people who wanted to see that.

Penn & Teller stopped doing practical jokes, and the reason is we got much too good at it.

In my run-ins with Christians ... I find that they really are good moral people. And we overlap on everything, and they don't seem to be the kind of people that are waiting to hear voices to tell them what to do.

America was founded on Christians not trusting each other, and they sometimes seemed more willing to reach out to the godless than to someone from another sect.

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing.

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality. That is the subject that, if you have a brain in your head, is always dealt with in magic. The smarter the tricks you're doing, the more that' s an important thing.

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It's the absence of religion, and that's a wonderful thing.

Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us.

'Moxie' is a name that was created by an American for the first national soft drink and then went on to mean chutzpah, and that's nice.

Everybody prefers to see a nut - they're more fascinating.

Astrology is a cousin of racism.

Computers absolutely changed my life. Before I had a computer, I had never written one thing. Not one thing. I'm a very bad speller and I was embarrassed by that. When I would type, the little mistakes would make me nutty, and I would never edit anything.

I mean, if I believed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn't believe that truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that.

I've never revved my car at a light for an attractive woman or an auto-rival, not even as a joke.

I like things matching. I have an upright bass, a drum kit and a grand piano that's the same color. I tend to overthink things.

I don't know what's best for other people.

Before you can read, you know the difference between a story and reality. And, of course, by the time you're old enough to do any real damage with an Uzi, you've learned that difference.

I think it's pretty cruel to give a kid a name that others are going to have. I think it's very important to have a unique name within any group you're likely to be in.

You don't have freedom unless you have the freedom to do stupid self-destructive things.

A lot of people, to attack an outspoken atheist, one of the things they'll do is say, 'You are as bad as the fundamentalist Christians.' And my answer is always, 'I hope so.'

The First Amendment says nothing about your getting paid for saying anything. It just says you can say it. I don't believe that if a corporation pulls all the money out of you or a network pulls their money away or you get fired, you're being censored.

I think voting for the lesser of two evils in game theory always leads to more evil.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Exploration of space is worth it because humans need to explore. Knowledge is always good, and it's a really cool thing to see.

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

I love nuts. I'm for nuts. I am nuts.

'Christian' used to be a throwaway word. People didn't used to use it much. People didn't start self-labeling or getting labeled Christian until the last part of the 20th century. Before that, you might identify as a Baptist, or a Southern Baptist or a Methodist. But there wasn't one identifier that put you in a fold with all the other believers.

I'm a big fan of gospel music, and you cannot be a fan of rock and roll, you cannot be a fan of country western music, and you can't really be a fan of jazz without listening to a lot of music that's religious.

Counterintuitive action makes a fellow feel smart.