Penn Jillette Quotes

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

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.

You get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right.

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

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

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

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

Much better than the feeling of having things is the feeling of having earned things.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality.

Better to be uneducated than educated by your government.

Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people

We are only here for a little while, and our bodies belong to ourselves and no one else.

If you believe that there’s a heaven and hell . . . how much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?

I believe that the best way to become an atheist is to read the bible

One of the strongest feelings you can get in life--one of the most rewarding feelings--is the feeling of an "Aha, I finally understand."

God works in mysterious, inefficient, and breathtakingly cruel ways

I had e-mail in 1984! I had an e-mail address then, which means that all you could write to was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There were three of us, writing to each other.

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

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

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.

Everyday is an atheist holiday.

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?

The medium is not the message - the message is the message.

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

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

Tolerance is you saying something crazy and me smiling and saying, 'That's nice.'

Comedy is taken care of by a free market.

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”.

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.

I am a huge fan of proselytizing. I am a huge fan of speaking your mind. The only way we can share the universe... is by talking very strongly about what we believe.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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.

Having a Hummer is stupid. It's stupid to waste that much gas. It's stupid to waste that much money on gas. It's stupid to parade your insecurities on public roads. Hummers are stupid-looking.

The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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.

Fear is the politicians dance partner.

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.

Everybody prefers to see a nut - they're more fascinating.

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.'

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.

I think that I am willing to risk my life in order to have more freedom.

World War II proves there's no God.

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

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

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