Top 100 Penn Jillette Quotes
#1. I'm not misunderstood. I am brash. I make my living being brash.
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#2. I intend to do the Penn & Teller show until they pry my cheesy magic wand from my cold dead fingers.
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#3. I don't question things that go against what I believe very much. But boy, the stuff that I really want to believe, I really question a lot.
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#5. Penn & Teller don't know jack about global warming.
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#6. 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.
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#7. 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.
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#8. Direct confrontation, direct conversation is real respect. And it's amazing how many people get that.
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#9. 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.
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#10. This is going to sound horrible, but I don't even know how much I make in a year. It must be, you know, a couple of million dollars, a few million. I know it's more money than my dad, a jail guard, made in his lifetime; more money than I'll ever need.
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#11. 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.
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#12. I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.
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#13. 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.
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#15. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.
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#17. If you like the stuff I do, my chances of liking you go up.
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#18. 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.
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#19. Hypocrisy is annoying but not evil. Someone who says one thing and does another has doubled their chances of being half right.
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#20. There is no reason for the government to limit political speech.
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#21. The evidence shows you that two things have been true throughout mankind's history: One, things always get better. Two, people always think they're getting worse.
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#22. 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.
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#23. We are only here for a little while, and our bodies belong to ourselves and no one else.
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#24. I think people under age 55 come to Vegas with a certain sense of irony.
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#25. When someone is trying to interpret something for you, they always have an agenda.
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#26. 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".
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#27. The pure unadulterated disgust of Washington seems to me to be a really good thing.
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#28. I've never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life.
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#29. 'Zolten' is a common Hungarian name, it's my wife's maiden name and most importantly, it's the name of Dracula's dog.
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#31. We know what racist people look like. They don't deny it. They just don't!
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#32. As I'm fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it's straight ahead.
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#33. I've been told by professional drug users that if I did the drugs, I would like the Dead. It seems like the most effective PSA against drugs could just play some Dead jams and say, "If you do drugs, you will like this kind of music." What other deterrent would one need?
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#34. Mentally ill people come from all belief systems.
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#35. My mom, if you asked her if she was interested in whether or not people gambled, would say no.
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#36. 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.
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#37. 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.
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#38. I grew up as a Christian. I suppose at some level I wanted to believe someone was watching over me.
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#39. That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its "hit" and you know more about our species' diversity.
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#40. Freedom means the freedom to be stupid, and that's what I want.
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#41. The medium is not the message - the message is the message.
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#42. Only Atheists have morals, the religious have reward and punishment. That's not morality, that's sucking up.
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#43. 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.
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#44. Modern American magic, late 20th century magic, is tremendously disrespectful of the audience.
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#45. 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.
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#46. 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.
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#47. You can't believe how pro-gay and pro-freedom-of-speech I am. I'm way out beyond anyone on the Left.
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#48. In the late twentieth century we consider solitude our natural condition. Mates divorce, and even friendship is diagnosed as a disorder - co-dependency. So the concept of living a life interlocked with another human is unthinkable
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#49. If you want to talk about magic, the stuff that blows me away is the stuff that's done close up.
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#50. My parents were teetotalers and my grandparents were - it's all the way back. It's New English puritanical tradition.
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#51. A famous monk once said, I don't always know what the right thing to do is, my Lord, but I think the fact that I want to please you pleases you.
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#52. 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.
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#53. All David Blaine is is a good-looking magician.
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#54. You should think about the world and feel about your heart.
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#55. For the most part, any serious magic show is not using very much technology newer than theatrical lights.
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#56. I think that I am willing to risk my life in order to have more freedom.
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#57. I love the idea that horror and fear is a celebration of health and life.
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#58. There's no job in show business that's harder than any other job outside show business.
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#59. 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.
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#60. Don't waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it'll make you bugnutty.
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#61. Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith.
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#62. 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.
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#63. Better to be uneducated than educated by your government.
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#64. I hate that not everything ever written is on iBooks. Man, I hate paper.
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#65. 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.
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#66. I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.' That's just a long-winded religious way to say, 'Shut up.
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#67. There never was a God. 'God is dead' is a halfway measure I won't go with.
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#68. 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.
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#69. Magic is the Special Olympics of entertainment.
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#70. 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.'
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#71. Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o, and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.
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#72. Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.
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#73. 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.
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#74. 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.
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#76. My love of computers, besides being practical, is very direct and visceral. I love the way things look on the screen.
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#77. If you can just convince the dope people that the gun people are right and the gun people that the dope people are right, we could actually live in a lot more freedom.
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#78. 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.
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#79. 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.
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#80. How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.
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#81. I'm always fascinated by the use of the first-person plural talking about sports.
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#82. Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate.
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#83. Proselytizing is a moral imperative and feeds the marketplace of ideas. I want to hear everyone tell the truth as they see it. I want to learn from everyone.
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#84. I have more contact with people who consume, for lack of a better word, my product than any other performers.
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#86. I've never revved my car at a light for an attractive woman or an auto-rival, not even as a joke.
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#87. That whole 99% thing, they are all in the 1% of the world. Every one of them pays a cellphone bill that is the yearly income for a family in much of the rest of the world.
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#88. I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.
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#89. Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.
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#91. 'Psycho' is fascinating philosophically, because the point of 'Psycho' is that everything that's bad happens because of love.
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#93. As much as I disagreed with every second of 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' the fact that it is out made me jump for joy.
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#94. Love and respect all people. Hate and destroy all faith.
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#95. It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.
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#96. Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around
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#97. 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.
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#98. 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.
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#99. I love when violent, dangerous art is done by people who are not violent and dangerous. I love that when George Romero was making 'Dawn of the Dead,' he was coaching his son's little league team.
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#100. 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.
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