Penn Jillette Quotes

Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.

Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics.

I have friends who are very pessimistic. They say you can't possibly be an optimist nowadays. But I think, taking the longer view, you can still be as optimistic as you want.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

There is a tendency to overestimate the positive things in our lives and underestimate the possibility of negative things

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.

I think women can save civilization.

It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again.

Our notion of an optimist is a man who knowing that each year was worse than the preceding, thinks next year will be better. And a pessimist is a man who knows the next year can't be worse than the last one.

I like to think of birthdays as celebrating life." "Only losers acknowledge they survived a year and hope they cheat death again.

If anything or anyone distresses you, think how you'll feel a week - a month - a year later. If you can imagine yourself being happy and peaceful then, why waste all that time? Be happy and peaceful now.

I am on the whole a defender of the current, despite being a conservative. I mean, I think things are better than when I was younger.

I believe in optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. But my hope is the people, the society, which is ahead of the government.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.

I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history--whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline.

Those who think that the rewarding things in life are somewhere over the rainbow 'burn their toast a lot,' said Pooh

A man that'd expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an' remains at large.

The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer's ink, think they're starting on the ground floor; so they're condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.

I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I identify more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers. Had I not become a writer that would have been me. Lots of our friends are still in that world and I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the 70s and became disillusioned in the 80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

It's easy to be pessimistic. Nobody needs to be taught how. You don't need to buy a book on it. You don't need to go to classes to learn how to be pessimistic. But you do read books on how to think positively, and people who write them become very rich because it takes effort.

You're always a bit blind. If you look at stuff a few years later, you get a more objective look at it.

I disagree that we need to contemplate eliminating ourselves in order to move forward. Sure, I think a good dystopian story can serve to steer us on the right path toward a better world. But we also need stories that offer solutions to our problems that are realistic, and workable today.

My stepdad always said, "If you're going to believe the good, you're going to believe the bad." I think that's really important.

Antonio Gramsci said that social reformers should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This means that one must have the intellectual ability to see how bad things are and the emotional ability to look forward with hope. It's a hard combination to sustain, but if you can do it, you can change the world.