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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Better to be uneducated than educated by your government.

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

I think I've discovered the secret of life -- you just hang around until you get used to it.

If our church is not marked by caring for the poor, the oppressed, the hungry, we are guilty of heresy.

There are two kinds of love: the love that is and the love that isn't.

I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.

If swimming is so good for your figure, how do you explain whales?

That is the strength of having a trusting and ongoing relationship that draws on our history and moves right on into our present, and I have that kind of marriage.

Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.

Good thing he's dead," Lula said, "or that would have hurt like the devil.

I don't want to be a star. If you have to label me anything, I'm an actor - I guess. A journeyman actor. I think 'star' is what you call actors who can't act.

Catering on planes, like on British Rail, is a standing joke, but I don't really have a problem with it. I don't quite know what people expect.