Top 288 Quotes & Sayings by Penn Jillette - Page 3

Mentally ill people come from all belief systems.

Juggling is very, very straightforward; very, very black and white; you're manipulating objects, not people. And that's always appealed to me.

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.

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

All David Blaine is is a good-looking magician.

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

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

Counterintuitive actions prove we can trust real knowledge and do the opposite of what we feel makes sense.

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.

There never was a God. 'God is dead' is a halfway measure I won't go with.

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

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

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

I live in Vegas, and I see people by the side of the road with cardboard signs who seem like they might have tried that spending their way out of debt thing.

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

Barack Obama is way smarter than Bush - so way, way smarter than me. Obama is way more charismatic than me.

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.

Every poker player is smarter than me.

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

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

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.

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

I've voted Libertarian as long as I can remember, but I don't really remember much before the Clintons and the Bushes. Those clans made a lot of us bugnutty.

A two-party system is way too good for those two parties.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

People like Bill Maher, who brags about being a cynic, it sickens me. I am the least cynical person I know, and I am very, very skeptical.

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

I've been fired from a situational comedy with a script they wrote specifically for me because of my voice.

I'm an amazing mama's boy.

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.

Bob Barr is not crazy enough for my taste.

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.

I don't speak for all Libertarians any more than Sean Penn speaks for all Democrats.

Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.

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 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.

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

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

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.

When 9/11 hit, the second thing I said to myself was, 'This really is what religious people do.' Those people flying the plane were very good, very pious, truly faithful believers. There's no other way to paint them. Of course, they are extremists by definition, but they certainly aren't going against Islam in any real way.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.