Quotes from Penn Jillette


Sorted by Popularity


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.


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.


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


Bacon is so good by itself that to put it in any other food is an admission of failure. You're basically saying, 'I can't make this other food taste good, so I'll throw in bacon.'


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.


Direct confrontation, direct conversation is real respect. And it's amazing how many people get that.


You have two choices with Obama. You either believe that he is a man of Christ... or you think he's a liar. And I'm surprised by the number of atheist free thinkers that support Obama, and their argument is essentially, 'He's lying about being religious 'cause you have to do that to get elected.' It's a horrible reason to like somebody.


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


There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can't do it in five minutes. You can't listen to 'The Rite of Spring' once and understand what Stravinsky was all about.


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


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


Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.


The secret truth of 'Celebrity Apprentice' is that it isn't very hard... 'Celebrity Apprentice' is easy like junior high is easy. All the arithmetic, the creative writing and the history are super simple, but like junior high, you do that easy work surrounded by people who are full-tilt, hormone-raging bug nutty.


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.


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


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.


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


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


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