In actuality, Muppets was a word we just coined. It was merely to be the name of our act. ... I used to say to people that it was a combination of 'marionettes' and 'puppets.' ... But then I stopped telling this lie, and I'm back to the truth: It just came out of midair.

"I am like a puppet sitting here. It's not just I; all of us are puppets. Nature is pulling the strings, but we believe we are acting. If you function that way (as puppets), then the problems are simple. But we have superimposed on that (the idea of) a "person" who is pulling those strings."

You are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are.

We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.

We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

We have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry … Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. … The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist … Puppetry is a completely controllable means to attack your characters in every possible way. The artist has the possibility to create a much larger landscape with puppetry. The human becomes more human in that sense. Another of the great things about puppetry is the ability to transform.

You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which may be your own.

I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.

We're so pleased that that is pure puppetry. If you take the puppeteers out, they're still being moved by the puppeteers. We'll have a very simple scene of a character that's doing a normal gesture, and that's many puppeteers to accomplish that.

There are so many forms of puppets. The ones on 'Sesame Street' are probably the most simple that we do.

This paucity of actors on the stage reflects the liturgical roots of Greek theater, which continued to stick close to its religious origins. … [A] machine, called the mēchanē, was a sort of crane that swung an actor playing a god over the parapet of the skēnē and out above the stage (thus the Latin phrase deus ex machina for a solution from nowhere, an unforeseen answer to prayers).

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

The universe is a puppet-show; Brahman is sole producer, Brahman is scenery and players, Brahman is sole spectator. The universe is Brahman, sportively self-deluded, taking delight in itself. The means of production is the power of delusion, or māyā; scenery and puppets are Brahman, self-stamped with 'name and form', its 'lower nature'—prakṛiti; as spectator it is puruṣa, retaining its proper nature.

When in the puppet-show of dreams we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply