Quotes from Penn Jillette

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.

I came to magic absolutely hating magic on a very, very deep level.

I'm totally against straight marriage - even though I'm married. I don't think heterosexual marriage is any of the government's business.

Teller and I worked Renaissance Festivals and street performing - actually more real, no kidding around, Philadelphia street performing than we did Renaissance Festivals.

My tolerance for crazy people is, I think, high a tolerance as you're ever going to find. I love being around David Allen Coe. I would have loved to hang out with Tiny Tim. I can listen to Sun Ra on a tape-recording rant.

A lot of older parents worry about being older parents. I hear people say, 'I don't want to be too old to play baseball with my son.' They worry that their kids will be embarrassed by their parents' age.

The only secret of magic is that I'm willing to work harder on it than you think it's worth.

Tommy Smothers is a hero of mine.

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing.

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

Don't waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it'll make you bugnutty.

Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it's getting worse.

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.

When 9/11 hit, the second thing I said to myself was, 'This really is what religious people do.' Those people flying the plane were very good, very pious, truly faithful believers. There's no other way to paint them. Of course, they are extremists by definition, but they certainly aren't going against Islam in any real way.

When I was a kid, politicians wanted to avoid talking about religion if they could. John F. Kennedy couldn't duck the issue, being Catholic and all. So how did he address it? By reminding Americans that religion shouldn't be an issue, that he was concentrating on big things like poverty and hunger and leading the space race.

Asking someone else to do something immoral is immoral.

'Zolten' is a common Hungarian name, it's my wife's maiden name and most importantly, it's the name of Dracula's dog.

I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I've read it three times all the way through. It's a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don't just read things I agree with.

The purpose of art is to collide the intellectual and visceral together at the highest speed possible.

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

I believe in individual rights so much that I don't like any sort of 'what's good for the cause'-type questions.

When you look at the actual numbers, the number of people who died after 9/11 was greater than the number of people who died in 9/11, even if you are talking Americans. But you know, I don't like to talk Americans. I want to talk everybody. More innocent people died after 9/11 because of 9/11 than died in 9/11.

When someone is trying to interpret something for you, they always have an agenda.

Computers absolutely changed my life. Before I had a computer, I had never written one thing. Not one thing. I'm a very bad speller and I was embarrassed by that. When I would type, the little mistakes would make me nutty, and I would never edit anything.