Top 200 Penn Jillette Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Freedom means the right to be stupid.”

— Penn Jillette

53. “You can’t stop insane people from doing insane things with insane laws. That’s insane!”

— Penn Jillette

54. “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

55. “The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology. The bottleneck is really in art.”

— Penn Jillette

56. “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

57. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

59. “Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be attributed to ignorance.”

— Penn Jillette

60. “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

61. “The medium is not the message – the message is the message.”

— Penn Jillette

62. “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

63. “It’s fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

65. “My parents were teetotalers and my grandparents were – it’s all the way back. It’s New English puritanical tradition.”

— Penn Jillette

66. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

67. “Bob Saget is the dirtiest comic who’s ever lived. Nobody touches him.”

— Penn Jillette

68. “In music, if you hit a wrong note, people forgive you. In magic when something goes wrong, the entire art is destroyed.”

— Penn Jillette

69. “I’ve never had a drink of alcohol or any drug in my life.”

— Penn Jillette

70. “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

71. “If you are doing something for reward or punishment, you do not have morality.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

74. “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

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

— Penn Jillette

76. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

77. “I don’t believe in vengeance. Really, when all is said and done, I probably don’t believe in punishment.”

— Penn Jillette

78. “I started out as a juggler, so I know what it means to spend eight hours a day, seven days a week practicing something that people just dismiss with a wave of hand.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

81. “I have a very specific definition of censorship. Censorship must be done by the government or it’s not censorship.”

— Penn Jillette

82. “All David Blaine is is a good-looking magician.”

— Penn Jillette

83. “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

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

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

88. “Much better than the feeling of having things is the feeling of having earned things.”

— Penn Jillette

89. “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

90. “You have no chance of scaring me with death, all the fear possible is contained in life.”

— Penn Jillette

91. “There is no god.” I’ve said that sentence on Glenn Beck’s TV show in front of his live audience at his studio in the Texas Bible Belt. I’ve told Republicans that I like immigrants. I’ve told Democrats that I dig rich people. I’ve told sane people that I like lawyers. But.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

93. “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.’”

— Penn Jillette

94. “Hypocrisy is annoying but not evil. Someone who says one thing and does another has doubled their chances of being half right.”

— Penn Jillette

95. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

96. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

98. “One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They’re all hanging from a thread – sometimes literally.”

— Penn Jillette

99. “Better to be uneducated than educated by your government.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette