Top 200 Penn Jillette Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I like things matching. I have an upright bass, a drum kit and a grand piano that’s the same color. I tend to overthink things.”

— Penn Jillette

152. “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

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

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

155. “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

156. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

157. “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

158. “When I was 15, 16, 17 years old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games.”

— Penn Jillette

159. “Comedy is taken care of by a free market.”

— Penn Jillette

160. “There’s no job in show business that’s harder than any other job outside show business.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

162. “I didn’t learn fire-eating to conquer my fears. I learned fire-eating because I desperately wanted to be in show business.”

— Penn Jillette

163. “I like movies that are scary, but I don’t want them to be dirt dumb. I want a movie that gets my blood racing, makes me laugh, but also gives me something to think about, with maybe a little sexy thrown in. Hollywood doesn’t make movies like that.”

— Penn Jillette

164. “Charities are really good. To a certain extent, the ones you pick are arbitrary.”

— Penn Jillette

165. “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

166. “Everybody prefers to see a nut – they’re more fascinating.”

— Penn Jillette

167. “Read everything and be kind.”

— Penn Jillette

168. “The vast majority of the world knows there’s no reason to circumcise. Someone should tell the doctors.”

— Penn Jillette

169. “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

170. “Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.”

— Penn Jillette

171. “Someone who is a good person should have no fear of the government whatsoever.”

— Penn Jillette

172. “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.”

— Penn Jillette

173. “I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.”

— Penn Jillette

174. “Don’t waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it’ll make you bugnutty.”

— Penn Jillette

175. “There should be an ease and clarity to anything that’s real and from the heart. Things that are true shouldn’t have tricks.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

177. “The fact is that violence gives you a rush.”

— Penn Jillette

178. “Technology adds nothing to art.”

— Penn Jillette

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

— Penn Jillette

180. “Modern American magic, late 20th century magic, is tremendously disrespectful of the audience.”

— Penn Jillette

181. “Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness.”

— Penn Jillette

182. “For the most part, any serious magic show is not using very much technology newer than theatrical lights.”

— Penn Jillette

183. “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

184. “Well, it’s not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I’ll spend to find out how to get people more of it.”

— Penn Jillette

185. “If I were trying to avoid embarrassment, I wouldn’t have stumbled my way through ‘Dancing with the Stars.’”

— Penn Jillette

186. “The best way to fight the terrorists is to have the freest country on earth. You should be able to get on an airplane, and people – that will not possibly happen again.”

— Penn Jillette

187. “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

188. “Performers have the right to say what they want to, and anyone paying money has the right to accept or reject the art and entertainment that’s available.”

— Penn Jillette

189. “We aren’t people who believe that just because we’re performers our opinions on everything need to be known.”

— Penn Jillette

190. “Poker would have never gotten on TV when we only had three networks.”

— Penn Jillette

191. “The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There’d be riots in the streets about the people we’re killing. And yet because it’s Obama, and he’s better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.”

— Penn Jillette

192. “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.”

— Penn Jillette

193. “Make deals with people, not paper.”

— Penn Jillette

194. “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

195. “When I buy Windows 98, I’m not only buying something useful, I’m giving money to Bill Gates, which is a really good thing.”

— Penn Jillette

196. “I’ve never revved my car at a light for an attractive woman or an auto-rival, not even as a joke.”

— Penn Jillette

197. “A lot of people, to attack an outspoken atheist, one of the things they’ll do is say, ‘You are as bad as the fundamentalist Christians.’ And my answer is always, ‘I hope so.’”

— Penn Jillette

198. “There never was a God. ‘God is dead’ is a halfway measure I won’t go with.”

— Penn Jillette

199. “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

200. “I’m always fascinated by the use of the first-person plural talking about sports.”

— Penn Jillette