Penn Jillette Quotes & Sayings

In any conflict, the crazier party generally wins. — Penn Jillette

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

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

My tolerance for crazy people is, I think, high a tolerance as you're ever going to find. I love being around David Allen Coe. I would have loved to hang out with Tiny Tim. I can listen to Sun Ra on a tape-recording rant. — Penn Jillette

We celebrities are desperate pigs. — Penn Jillette

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

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. — Penn Jillette

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

Love and respect all people. Hate and destroy all faith. — Penn Jillette

Magic is the Special Olympics of entertainment. — Penn Jillette

I believe in individual rights so much that I don't like any sort of 'what's good for the cause'-type questions. — Penn Jillette

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

Once you have somebody that is telling you, 'We are interpreting God for you,' it seems like you either agree or you don't. You either say, like Martin Luther, 'I'm going to have a direct relationship with the word of God,' or I'm going to go through a conduit of God on Earth,' which would be the Pope. — Penn Jillette

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

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

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. — Penn Jillette

This I believe: I believe there is no God. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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.' — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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

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

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

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. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision. — Penn Jillette

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 Jillette

You should think about the world and feel about your heart. — Penn Jillette

If entertainment ran grocery stores, we'd NEVER get oil cured olives or blue cheese, it would be JUST Coke. — Penn Jillette

Even one person's misunderstanding [of a blue joke] may not be worth the next guy's laugh. — Penn Jillette

I'm always fascinated by the use of the first-person plural talking about sports. — Penn Jillette

How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? — Penn Jillette

So no one cares - and that protects your personal privacy. At least most of the time no one cares. I'm not making the argument that if we're doing nothing wrong, then we shouldn't be afraid of the government monitoring us. That's a stupid, bad argument. We should always be afraid of any government monitoring us. The fact that no one cares what we're talking about is an argument for keeping it that way. We don't want the government to be able to care. Any power you give the government, the government will abuse. George Washington almost said that. — Penn Jillette

When you look at the actual numbers, the number of people who died after 9/11 was greater than the number of people who died in 9/11, even if you are talking Americans. But you know, I don't like to talk Americans. I want to talk everybody. More innocent people died after 9/11 because of 9/11 than died in 9/11. — Penn Jillette

Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be attributed to ignorance. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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

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

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. — Penn Jillette

Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith. — Penn Jillette

But it's much more exciting to make Die Hard. One of the reasons that I think that movie is so successful is it deals with those very important blue-collar relationship themes. But it's more visually beautiful to show things blowing up. It just gives you more on the screen. — Penn Jillette

We all have friends we love dearly that couldn't pass for human in a strict Turing test. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

We have to fight for the freedom to be stupid, and smoking is one of the best ways to fight for your freedom, to be just as stupid as you can be. — Penn Jillette

I've never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life. — Penn Jillette

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

We know what racist people look like. They don't deny it. They just don't! — Penn Jillette

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". — Penn Jillette

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

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

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

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

I came to magic absolutely hating magic on a very, very deep level. — Penn Jillette

The medium is not the message - the message is the message. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

The cliche of the nerdy kid who doesn't go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it's also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It's beautiful. — Penn Jillette

The word "holiday" comes from "holy day" and holy means "exalted and worthy of complete devotion." By that definition, all days are holy. Life is holy. Atheists have joy every day of the year, every holy day. We have the wonder and glory of life. We have joy in the world before the lord is come. We're not going for the promise of life after death; we're celebrating life before death. The smiles of children. The screaming, the bitching, the horrific whining of one's own children. The glory of giving or receiving a blow job. Sunsets, rock and roll, bebop, Jell-O, stinky cheese, and offensive jokes.
For atheists, everything in the world is enough and every day is holy. Every day is an atheist holiday. It's a day that we're alive. — Penn Jillette

If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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

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. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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

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

My whole family is missing that sports gene. I hope I didn't screw that up by marrying a great golfer. — Penn Jillette

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

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. — Penn Jillette

If you believe that there's a heaven and hell and people could be going to hell - or not getting eternal life or whatever - and you think that, well, it's not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward ... How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

I'm very happy being big and effeminate. — Penn Jillette

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

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. — Penn Jillette

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

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

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

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. — Penn Jillette

The first thing I said to myself on 9/11 was, 'There go our civil rights.' I found out by comparing notes later that George Carlin and I both said that at the exact same time. That's the first thing that popped into our head. — Penn Jillette

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

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. — Penn Jillette

'Psycho' is fascinating philosophically, because the point of 'Psycho' is that everything that's bad happens because of love. — Penn Jillette

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

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. — Penn Jillette

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

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

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. — Penn Jillette

Counterintuitive action makes a fellow feel smart. — Penn Jillette

Every nut who kills people has a Bible lying around. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

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. — Penn Jillette

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don't really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion. — Penn Jillette

I was always a little embarrassed when there was an act on television that requires a great deal of skill but is a little goofy, and the host comes over and acts like the person doing this skill is some sort of fool for having learned to do something that's very, very difficult. — Penn Jillette

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

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

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

The fact is that violence gives you a rush. — Penn Jillette

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