Penn Jillette

“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.”

“If you like the stuff I do, my chances of liking you go up.”

“The first thing I said to myself on 9/11 was, 'There go our civil rights.' I found out by comparing notes later that George Carlin and I both said that at the exact same time. That's the first thing that popped into our head.”

“I think it's pretty cruel to give a kid a name that others are going to have. I think it's very important to have a unique name within any group you're likely to be in.”

“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.”

“In my run-ins with Christians... I find that they really are good moral people. And we overlap on everything, and they don't seem to be the kind of people that are waiting to hear voices to tell them what to do.”

“Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.”

“I'm totally clean and sober my whole life.”

“We know what racist people look like. They don't deny it. They just don't!”

“Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.”

“America was founded on Christians not trusting each other, and they sometimes seemed more willing to reach out to the godless than to someone from another sect.”

“It's amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people yourself is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral, self-righteous, bullying laziness.”

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

“I was always a little embarrassed when there was an act on television that requires a great deal of skill but is a little goofy, and the host comes over and acts like the person doing this skill is some sort of fool for having learned to do something that's very, very difficult.”

“Even if I disagree with Obama on many, many things, he is certainly qualified to be president. He is certainly competent to be president.”

“I've voted Libertarian as long as I can remember, but I don't really remember much before the Clintons and the Bushes. Those clans made a lot of us bugnutty.”

“There are performers who have built their whole career doing magic on TV and can't really perform live at all - don't really have jobs and skills.”

“Every day, TV, newspapers, and the Internet bombard us with a message that we're destroying the earth. Ice caps are melting, rivers are dying, polar bears are drowning, and trees are doing something.”

“You can't believe how pro-gay and pro-freedom-of-speech I am. I'm way out beyond anyone on the Left.”

“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.”