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The skills that we have are the actual magic skills - not the performing skills. We have to separate those. But the actual skills that make the tricks work, we don't get to use again.

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
Use
Work
Make
Actual
Tricks
Separate
Performing
Skills
Magic

More quotes by Penn Jillette

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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.
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The secret truth of 'Celebrity Apprentice' is that it isn't very hard... 'Celebrity Apprentice' is easy like junior high is easy. All the arithmetic, the creative writing and the history are super simple, but like junior high, you do that easy work surrounded by people who are full-tilt, hormone-raging bug nutty.
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One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They're all hanging from a thread - sometimes literally.
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When someone is trying to interpret something for you, they always have an agenda.
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If you want to turn out an atheist child, unconditional love constantly is a good way to do it.
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If you can just convince the dope people that the gun people are right and the gun people that the dope people are right, we could actually live in a lot more freedom.
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Penn & Teller stopped doing practical jokes, and the reason is we got much too good at it.
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Everyday is an atheist holiday.
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So many people say, ‘You know, your taxes aren’t taken by force,’ and that’s foolish. If you don’t pay your taxes and you don’t answer the warrant and you don’t go to court, eventually someone will pull a gun. Eventually someone with a gun will show up.
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I love the idea that horror and fear is a celebration of health and life.
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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.
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If you spend a lot of time lying to people, you think a lot about what the truth means.
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Trey Parker did 'Book of Mormon.' It's the best Broadway show I've ever seen. He does 'South Park.' It's wonderful.
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Thou shalt not take anything on faith
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If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
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The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology. The bottleneck is really in art.
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World War II proves there's no God.
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We all have friends we love dearly that couldn't pass for human in a strict Turing test.
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I think that I am willing to risk my life in order to have more freedom.
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I'm not bothered by the idea of getting old, or I guess you could say by having arrived at old. I was 10 when my mom turned 55. For 1955, she was a very old mom.
Penn Jillette