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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.

Penn Jillette

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Penn Jillette
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: March 5
Actor
Circus Performer
Comedian
Film Actor
Film Director
Illusionist
Jongleur
Magician
Musician
Novelist
Podcaster
Radio Personality
Greenfield
Massachusetts
Penn Fraser Jillette
Found
Exact
Firsts
George
First
Compare
Thing
Civil
Time
Notes
Later
Carlin
Head
Popped
Rights
Comparing

More quotes by Penn Jillette

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The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology. The bottleneck is really in art.
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This I believe: I believe there is no God.
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There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can't do it in five minutes. You can't listen to 'The Rite of Spring' once and understand what Stravinsky was all about.
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My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.
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My parents were teetotalers and my grandparents were - it's all the way back. It's New English puritanical tradition.
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When someone is trying to interpret something for you, they always have an agenda.
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Juggling is very, very straightforward very, very black and white you're manipulating objects, not people. And that's always appealed to me.
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When I was 15, 16, 17 years old, I spent five hours a day juggling, and I probably spent six hours a day seriously listening to music. And if I were 16 now, I would put that time into playing video games.
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I'm really happy with all the art that was inspired by religion, and I think I'd be tickled to little tiny pieces if art in the future was inspired by other things.
Penn Jillette
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Everybody is designing magic iPhone apps that do things that are really, really beautiful, but a really important thing about magic is that the gimmick has to be ugly.
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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.
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I'm a big fan of gospel music, and you cannot be a fan of rock and roll, you cannot be a fan of country western music, and you can't really be a fan of jazz without listening to a lot of music that's religious.
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We knew that we were kind of odd and creeps, and we wanted to do odd, creepy stuff for people who wanted to see that.
Penn Jillette
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A joke is a way to say, 'I'm going to do something funny now. If I don't get a laugh at the end, I'm a failure.'
Penn Jillette
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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.
Penn Jillette
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I, my own damn self, am not a Tea Party supporter. I disagree with them on social liberties, our overseas wars, Obama's birthplace, Sarah Palin, and the conspicuous absence of tea at their rallies.
Penn Jillette
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You have in Vegas the most heterogeneous audience you're gonna get anywhere in the country. In Boston, Chicago, Miami, you know who goes to the theater. In Vegas, you have people who only see one theater show a year, and it's in Vegas.
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Cheerios bring back memories. I actually don't think I ate them much as a kid, though maybe it's some sort of Jungian memory, I don't know. But they have so much sugar, it's great.
Penn Jillette
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In reality, many people let go of religion later in life.
Penn Jillette
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I don't think I'm made of the right stuff to be a politician. I think I'm made to be a loose cannon.
Penn Jillette