Penn Jillette Quotes

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around

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.

Atheism is the only real hope against terrorism.

It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that life and the love of your real friends and family is more than enough to make life worth living. Isn't it much sadder to feel that there is a more important love required than the love of the people who have chosen to spend their limited time with you?

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

In the late twentieth century we consider solitude our natural condition. Mates divorce, and even friendship is diagnosed as a disorder - co-dependency. So the concept of living a life interlocked with another human is unthinkable

... if you use the word “we,” and you’re not talking about eight billion people, fuck you.

TCA pretends to be about raising money for charity. That’s true, but only so far. If I had not taken time off from the Penn & Teller show to do The Celebrity Apprentice — if Teller and I had just done our show, gotten usual pay — I could have donated four times the amount of money that Trump had pledged to give my charity if I won the whole damn shooting match. Opportunity Village, “my” charity that helps intellectually disabled adults to enter society, got a lot of attention because I was on The Celebrity Apprentice, and that does count for something. And when I was “fired,” my real bosses at Caesars, who own the Rio and the Penn & Teller Theater, said, “Oh, you wanted a quarter million for Opportunity Village? We don’t have to do some jive TV show; we’ll just write a check.” They wrote the full winning amount to Opportunity Village and everyone was happy.

Not only does god definitely play dice … he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.

As I’m fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead.

Someone who is paying attention can do the same thing that Trump is doing with hate, and do it with love, and become president … That’s kind of beautiful. There’s nothing more optimistic than that. … Donald Trump does, when it comes right down to it, fuck up everything … He fucks up his casinos. He fucks up his buildings.... Maybe he’ll fuck up his campaign before he fucks up the country.

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”.

We all have friends we love dearly that couldn't pass for human in a strict Turing test.

I have nothing good to say about Donald Trump as president.

I’m a zealot wearing a broccoli suicide vest to a Burger King.