Top 122 Penn Jillette Quotes

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

People still seem to think that they should vote themselves money. They seem to think there is stuff which they think is the government’s job, when it’s really the individual’s job.

I don’t want anyone as president who promises to take care of me. I may be stupid, but I want a chance to try to be a grown-up and take care of my family.

The vast majority of people who have guns never hurt anybody.

‘Psycho’ is fascinating philosophically, because the point of ‘Psycho’ is that everything that’s bad happens because of love.

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people yourself is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral, self-righteous, bullying laziness.

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.

I believe very much that the most damning thing you can say about Muslims is that you’re afraid to say anything because they’ll hurt you.

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

Jay-Z, he knows precisely who he’s going for – 14-year-old white suburban girls.

Someone who is a good person should have no fear of the government whatsoever.

Tolerance is you saying something crazy and me smiling and saying, ‘That’s nice.’

If there are two things Penn & Teller stand for, it’s the truth & lying, although not necessarily in that order.

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.

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

I don’t think I’m made of the right stuff to be a politician. I think I’m made to be a loose cannon.

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 like movies that are scary, but I don’t want them to be dirt dumb. I want a movie that gets my blood racing, makes me laugh, but also gives me something to think about, with maybe a little sexy thrown in. Hollywood doesn’t make movies like that.

Building a professional relationship on respect as opposed to affection is a very good idea. Running your art projects the way you’d run a dry-cleaning business is also a really good idea. You shouldn’t go into work like you’re going on a date, like you’re hanging out with friends.

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.

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

We celebrities are desperate pigs.

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

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.

World War II proves there’s no God.

My love of computers, besides being practical, is very direct and visceral. I love the way things look on the screen.

It wasn’t success, because Teller and I, by the time Asparagus Valley got together – within a year, we had achieved all our goals. I mean, our goal was to earn our living doing exactly what we wanted. Which is many people’s goal.

I get along so much better with fundamentalist Christians than I do with wishy-washy liberals, who want everyone to get along.

Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else’s vision.

To drive a car in rural America is freedom. Before I had a car, I’d never seen a rock and roll show, I’d never seen a comic or a show.

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

Magic is the Special Olympics of entertainment.

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 love the feeling of shredded wheat. I love healthy bird food with a fun-to-eat feel. Then you spray them with sugar, and I’m there.

From 1985 to 1994, I lived in Manhattan in a big old loft right off Times Square. I could walk to work, which was in a couple of Broadway theaters, to Howard Stern’s studio, and to 30 Rock for ‘Letterman’ and ‘SNL.’ Even in New York, walking to work is homey and folksy, like living in a small town.

I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I’ve read it three times all the way through. It’s a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don’t just read things I agree with.

Mentally ill people come from all belief systems.

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

Every day, TV, newspapers, and the Internet bombard us with a message that we’re destroying the earth. Ice caps are melting, rivers are dying, polar bears are drowning, and trees are doing something.

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

Everyone’s goals are the same with very small differences. I mean, the goal of a socialist and the goal of a libertarian are exactly the same. The goals are happiness and security and freedom, and you balance those.

Showbiz is just there to give people something to talk about.

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

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.

If you like the stuff I do, my chances of liking you go up.

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.

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

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

Religion is faith. Faith is belief without evidence. Belief without evidence cannot be shared. Faith is a feeling. Love is also a feeling, but love makes no universal claims. Love is pure.

Penn & Teller don’t know jack about global warming.

I’m not bothered by the idea of getting old, or I guess you could say by having arrived at old. I was 10 when my mom turned 55. For 1955, she was a very old mom.

My body really, really wanted to reproduce when I was 15. It took a lot of civilization, socialization, willpower and some emulsion polymerization technology for me not to reproduce at 15.

I am a huge fan of proselytizing. I am a huge fan of speaking your mind. The only way we can share the universe… is by talking very strongly about what we believe.

‘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.

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

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.

Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around.

Trey Parker did ‘Book of Mormon.’ It’s the best Broadway show I’ve ever seen. He does ‘South Park.’ It’s wonderful.

There is no reason for the government to limit political speech.

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

I was about 12 when I heard my first Lenny Bruce record. He was already dead. But it changed my life and really did change the world.

All David Blaine is is a good-looking magician.

Everybody is designing magic iPhone apps that do things that are really, really beautiful, but a really important thing about magic is that the gimmick has to be ugly.

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

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

I have more contact with people who consume, for lack of a better word, my product than any other performers.

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 speak for all Libertarians any more than Sean Penn speaks for all Democrats.

I intend to do the Penn & Teller show until they pry my cheesy magic wand from my cold dead fingers.

I’m really happy with all the art that was inspired by religion, and I think I’d be tickled to little tiny pieces if art in the future was inspired by other things.

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.

My mom, if you asked her if she was interested in whether or not people gambled, would say no.

Tommy Smothers is a hero of mine.

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.

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

I like to read in the dark. I like to go into the bathtub, turn out all the lights, and in the dark, read my books.

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

Religion is often just tribalism: pride in a group one was born into, a group that is often believed to have ‘God’ on its side.

Don’t waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it’ll make you bugnutty.

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

We need a president who realizes that there’s no government business in show business.

The highest ideals are human intelligence, creativity and love. Respect these above all.

If I were trying to avoid embarrassment, I wouldn’t have stumbled my way through ‘Dancing with the Stars.’

I do believe that a belief in God is crazy, but that doesn’t mean that the people who believe in it are crazy. Those are two different things. Ideas can be stupid and crazy, and the people who hold those ideas are not necessarily stupid and crazy.

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.

Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.

The reason I’m an I.B.M.-type guy today is that I really needed a laptop back in 1986, and I just couldn’t wait for the Powerbook.

My hair is way, way long. I’ve hitchhiked across the country a zillion times. I’ve ridden in every car. I was never a hippie. It takes more than long hair.

I think people under age 55 come to Vegas with a certain sense of irony.

The definition of a stupid thing is something that if you do everything right, you still get hurt. Fire-eating and love are stupid things.

I had e-mail in 1984! I had an e-mail address then, which means that all you could write to was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There were three of us, writing to each other.

I think one of the things about Donald Trump that’s interesting is he lives in a rarified atmosphere where it’s possible that he doesn’t get enough feedback, enough people rolling their eyes at him. It’s a danger more in show business than it is with wealth.

If you want to turn out an atheist child, unconditional love constantly is a good way to do it.

Every poker player is smarter than me.

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

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

Everybody wants clean, safe energy. Some people think nuclear is the way to go. Some people think coal is the way to go. Some people think wind is the way to go. And there’s always balances on that.

The fact is that violence gives you a rush.

I will forever stick up for Catholics and Christians in general. With a small number of very horrible exceptions, they do play by the rules.

If I had to imagine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent power in the universe that chose to make my mother suffer, I don’t know how I would make that make sense in the universe.

Poker has the feeling of a sport, but you don’t have to do push-ups.

TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people.

Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing – actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals.

The purpose of art is to collide the intellectual and visceral together at the highest speed possible.

I’m a big fan of huge populations of people, so you’d think with 300 million people in the country, you don’t even have to please 1% to be phenomenally successful.

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

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.

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

I’m totally clean and sober my whole life.

You have to be careful as a libertarian because you can sound very Republican.

There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can’t really perform live at all – don’t really have jobs and skills.

I hate that not everything ever written is on iBooks. Man, I hate paper.

When you’re watching Psycho, there’ s that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you’re not, and that’s where the celebration comes in.

I love the idea that horror and fear is a celebration of health and life.

Having a Hummer is stupid. It’s stupid to waste that much gas. It’s stupid to waste that much money on gas. It’s stupid to parade your insecurities on public roads. Hummers are stupid-looking.

No one can tell you the rules of ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ No one. Donald Trump just does what he wants, which is mostly pontificating to people who are sucking up to him, while the network people try to manipulate him into making the highest-rated show they can.

When you tell other people to do stuff they don’t know how to do, they tend to freak out.

It’s only the losers named ‘Dave’ that think having an unusual name is bad, and who cares what they think? They’re named ‘Dave.’

I’m an amazing mama’s boy.

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.

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