Top 200 Penn Jillette Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “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

102. “You don’t have freedom unless you have the freedom to do stupid self-destructive things.”

— Penn Jillette

103. “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

104. “Astrology is a cousin of racism.”

— Penn Jillette

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Channeling is just bad ventriloquism. You use another voice, but people can see your lips moving.”

— Penn Jillette

108. “Everybody wants clean, safe energy. Some people think nuclear is the way to go. Some people think coal is the way to go. Some people think wind is the way to go. And there’s always balances on that.”

— Penn Jillette

109. “I’m a hardcore libertarian – I want everything legal – but I also believe that you have the right to free association.”

— Penn Jillette

110. “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

111. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

112. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

113. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

114. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

115. “No one can tell you the rules of ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ No one. Donald Trump just does what he wants, which is mostly pontificating to people who are sucking up to him, while the network people try to manipulate him into making the highest-rated show they can.”

— Penn Jillette

116. “Fear is the politicians dance partner.”

— Penn Jillette

117. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

118. “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

119. “The definition of a stupid thing is something that if you do everything right, you still get hurt. Fire-eating and love are stupid things.”

— Penn Jillette

120. “My whole family is missing that sports gene. I hope I didn’t screw that up by marrying a great golfer.”

— Penn Jillette

121. “I like to read in the dark. I like to go into the bathtub, turn out all the lights, and in the dark, read my books.”

— Penn Jillette

122. “You have in Vegas the most heterogeneous audience you’re gonna get anywhere in the country. In Boston, Chicago, Miami, you know who goes to the theater. In Vegas, you have people who only see one theater show a year, and it’s in Vegas.”

— Penn Jillette

123. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

127. “Barack Obama is way smarter than Bush – so way, way smarter than me. Obama is way more charismatic than me.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

129. “I don’t think anything gives your life joy and meaning. I think your life simply has joy and meaning. The love for my children, the love for my parents and the love for my friends is the end in itself. The meaning is life.”

— Penn Jillette

130. “I have no evidence that libertarianism leads to a better life. I just think it is morally right.”

— Penn Jillette

131. “In reality, many people let go of religion later in life.”

— Penn Jillette

132. “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

133. “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

134. “If stupid hippies hadn’t killed nuclear power, we’d have nuclear power plants, safer and cheaper than coal-fired plants, all over, and electric cars really would be zero emissions.”

— Penn Jillette

135. “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

136. “The Tea Party claims to want small government.”

— Penn Jillette

137. “Even if I disagree with Obama on many, many things, he is certainly qualified to be president. He is certainly competent to be president.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

139. “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

140. “Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion.”

— Penn Jillette

141. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

142. “It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more.”

— Penn Jillette

143. “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

144. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

145. “I never wanted to be a magician. I never wanted to be a comedian. I never wanted to be onstage.”

— Penn Jillette

146. “From 1985 to 1994, I lived in Manhattan in a big old loft right off Times Square. I could walk to work, which was in a couple of Broadway theaters, to Howard Stern’s studio, and to 30 Rock for ‘Letterman’ and ‘SNL.’ Even in New York, walking to work is homey and folksy, like living in a small town.”

— Penn Jillette

147. “I don’t believe the majority always knows what’s best for everyone.”

— Penn Jillette

148. “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

149. “I don’t speak for all Libertarians any more than Sean Penn speaks for all Democrats.”

— Penn Jillette

150. “In any conflict, the crazier party generally wins.”

— Penn Jillette