Penn Jillette

But [he] had lost god, and all his family and friends were staying behind with his imaginary friend. A silly dream goes away and takes with it your whole real life.

Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith.

I will not counter the insanity of the PATRIOT Act with an overblown fear of my rights being taken away.

It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that life and the love of your real friends and family is more than enough to make life worth living. Isn't it much sadder to feel that there is a more important love required than the love of the people who have chosen to spend their limited time with you?

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

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.

I don't want anyone as president who promises to take care of me. I may be stupid, but I want a chance to try to be a grown-up and take care of my family.

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

Direct confrontation, direct conversation is real respect. And it's amazing how many people get that.

I'm an amazing mama's boy.

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.

I think people under age 55 come to Vegas with a certain sense of irony.

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.

My love of computers, besides being practical, is very direct and visceral. I love the way things look on the screen.

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.

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.

My whole family is missing that sports gene. I hope I didn't screw that up by marrying a great golfer.

I'm always fascinated by the use of the first-person plural talking about sports.