Derren Brown Quotes (136 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Derren Brown: 136 quotes0 likes

Famous Derren Brown Quotes

“(DVD introduction) Well, welcome to your very own DVD of me, DVB, and ‘Mind Control’. If you weren’t expecting me and thought you were buying Reginald Perrin, then press eject now before you begin vomiting. Otherwise, please, please ensure that you are sitting in an extreme level of comfort, preferably in pre-worn slippers and, I trust, with your extended family around you. If you have seen the film ‘Signs’ and would like to wear the pointy tin foil hats now would be a good time to put them on you can’t be too careful. Well, pphhh, goodness me, er, it’s been a meteoric rise over these last years. The money and sex are exhausting and I have you the viewer to thank. Thanks. We’ve put together some of the pieces from the specials and series in glistening digital format, each pixel hand picked and gently polished and brought to you in wide-sound, surround-screen enjoyment. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I’ll enjoy the royalties from this, which is enormously. If you don’t like it and HMV won’t take it back because you’ve got sticky all over it then the disc makes an excellent beer coaster or wheels for a space truck or can be immense fun just putting it on your finger and [waggling it], like that. But I hope you do like it. When I first started developing these techniques I had no idea that they were going to prove at all popular and for all my nancing about and staring I’m actually really excited to have a DVD out and can’t wait to go and find it in Discount Books & Puzzles next to the Dizzie Gillespie CD box sets and disappointing erotica. I hope you like it and if you do, please go and buy another one.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“(In answer to the question ‘How would you describe yourself in three words?’) Short and balding.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“The Ouija board is a really interesting phenomenon. It works by something called idiomotor suggestion. You do actually push the glass yourself you just have no awareness of doing it.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: Séance (2004)

“One area which shows how unknowingly predictable we are, is the way we decorate our houses. We all feel we make unique and distinct choices, yet we all conform to a cultural standard.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Since the 1920s, grand illusion on stage has been synonymous with the restraint and mutilation of female assistants, as if the first act a lucky mortal, newly endowed with the ability to overturn the laws of the universe, would wish to carry out would be the casual torture of the fairer sex for our entertainment.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

Derren Brown Quotes about people

“Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practice anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“(Speaking about Chris Ryan, ex-SAS) Charming! Sat there in his white jeans and wanted me to fail. I don't know what he had against me. I'm sure it was nothing to do with my over use of the word ‘podia’, which I hoped would irritate him a little bit more than it did. Some people…”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

“If you concern yourself with telling or showing people how interesting you are, you will at best provoke a temporary response of polite interest until even that gives way to annoyance. If you let people find it out for themselves, you become a real source of fascination.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“There are people who have the ability to wake up a minute or even seconds before their alarm goes off or to know what time they’ve woken up without even looking at a clock. Now, thank God, I don’t have to get up in the mornings but the potential of the body to keep such accurate time is remarkable.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“For me, the most enjoyable aspect of going out and performing is that I never know how susceptible people will be to my methods.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“A lot is said about children having stronger psychic ability because they’re so unjaded and innocent. This excruciating view of children is generally expounded by people who think like children and perhaps can be forgiven.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Derren Brown Quotes about thinking

“The capacity for self-deception, rarely acknowledged or understood by those who offer us supernatural answers to our problems, is huge: as easy as it is to make a medium’s cold-reading statements ‘fit’ our own situation and come to believe that he must have some paranormal insight, it is hardly any more difficult for a would-be psychic with an average ego, upon hearing frequently positive feedback, to believe over time that he must be blessed with a special gift. It’s harder to think you’re doing it for real when you’re tossing tambourines in the dark or have ready-made ectoplasm stuffed into your mouth or bottom.”

Derren Brown

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

“The Sun has come to represent enlightenment and salvation across many cultures. I think that if we remove such comforting concepts we are required to do more soul searching but eventually our eyes become accustomed to the dark and our lives become richer.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Being open minded isn’t about accepting things mindlessly. Being open minded is about having the information and then making the best decisions you can. A chap called Ian Rowland who wrote a good book on cold-reading made the point that if you’re a chef and you think, ‘well I know if I put poison in this soup and give it to these 200 people it’s going to kill them but, hey, I’ll be open minded’, that’s not being open minded, that’s just being ignorant. That’s just not working with the information you’ve got. So we have information on things like placebo effect and information about cold-reading. These things exists – false memories and anecdotal [evidence], all those things that are important – and taking that on board is just about being able to make better decisions. That’s about being truly open minded. Ignoring them and putting them to one side in this pursuit of easy answers and ‘intuition is the be-all and end-all of truth’, that’s not being open minded at all. I think that’s very narrow minded and certainly to laugh at people who say that evidence is important, I think that’s hypocrisy of the worst kind, to call them narrow minded.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

“All of us can be influenced through psychological techniques. For example, if I say “don’t think of a black cat” what do you do? You think of a black cat because the command ‘think of a black cat’ was there in the sentence. Techniques like this can be used to influence people’s thoughts, behaviour, even their memory.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“Do you think astrologists, palm readers and the like can really tell everything about you? That your personality can be read from your birth date, your hand or from sensing vibrations? Very possible.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“In the next episode you’ll see two people draw a picture of an angel and notice when they do that they draw the angel from a particularly secular perspective. And I’m certainly not one to begin to criticise the religio-artistic viewpoint of my two charming volunteers but it does make you stop and think what spiritually vacuous times we live in when two young people instinctively draw an angel with a halo attached to the back of its head with a stick.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

Derren Brown: Trending quotes

“When we are customarily annoyed by what we see as the failings of others, we are judging them by a ludicrous standard: we are assuming that they fully understand our desires, quite possibly better than we do, and that they have nothing to do but arrange things to fall seamlessly into place around our probably ill-communicated wishes.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“If a piece of 'alternative medicine' can be shown to work reliably, it ceases to become alternative. It just becomes medicine.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“This program fuses magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. I achieve all the results you’ll see here through a varied mixture of those techniques. At no point are actors or stooges used in the show.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Derren Brown Quotes

“Fingers: We’ve all got them and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about them.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“I control the conditions so my testers become my testees.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“One can be a true believer in anything: psychic ability, Christianity or, as Bertrand Russell classically suggested (with irony), in the fact there is a teapot orbiting the earth. I could believe any of those things with total conviction. But my conviction doesn't make them true. Indeed, it is something of an insult to the very truth I might hold dear to say that something is true just because I believe it is.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“[one part of the show is] a reenactment of a powerful experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 to look at how normal people can commit atrocious acts, simply because they’re following orders. Milgram’s parents were Jewish refugees in World War II and his pioneering work speaks volumes about the nature of responsibility.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: The Heist (2006)

“If you approach any psychic with any sort of scepticism you’ll see through pretty much all of it unless they happen to get lucky.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

“Some people like to talk of intuition as a way of knowing truth; that gut reactions are as good as evidence based facts. It’s a really silly way of thinking…”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Most people think themselves kind enough, but rather like a magician thinking he is fooling an audience who can see through his trick, we are the worst judges of the effect we have on others. True, we can mentally point out various kindnesses we have committed and those pleasant aspects of ourselves. Yet by doing so, we ignore the real test cases: how we behave under pressure, how nice we are to people we don’t like, how we deal with other people who seem determined to not live up to our unrealistic expectations.”

Derren Brown

Books, There’s Probably No God - The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)

“I deeply, and widely, believe that performance is a very personal affair, and that one must pursue one’s own sense of integrity and remain a little detached from advice and precedent offered by tradition.”

Derren Brown

Books, Pure Effect - Direct Mind Reading and Magical Artistry (2000)

“To forgive purely because it is nicer to forgive, and to do so when it’s a tough call; to try to speak only kindly of those we know because it is preferable to do so; to enjoy the successes of others because living thus is more enjoyable than the stress of living resentfully: such kind things make us better, lovlier people. And to try to live this way for its own merits, without invoking a supernatural reason for doing so, is to celebrate our humanity and to give kindness back its teeth.”

Derren Brown

Books, There’s Probably No God - The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)

“(speaking in a solemn tone to a group of young school children) Now you know that your headmistress, Miss Davis, was going to come in here and just check that you were all going to be well behaved. She can’t do that because, as many of you probably know, she can’t be here today, er, because her pants fell down earlier on. It’s not funny. If any of you see her, don’t make a fuss because it’s a bit embarrassing for her, OK? Alright? It’s not funny.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“By a man’s boots, by his trouser knee, by his cuffs, by his coat tails, by all of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.’ Words spoken there by Sherlock Holmes, I believe… although it may have been Westlife.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

“People are always saying, “Can you use your skills to get extraordinarily beautiful women into bed?” Well… yes, yes I can.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“All told, kindness is not fashionable”

Derren Brown

Books, There’s Probably No God - The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)

“Paul [McKenna] and I have been working on making each other’s hair fall out for years now, with some success.”

Derren Brown

TV recordings of stage shows, Svengali (2012), Svengali tour brochure

“So, what I do is a mixture of genuine psychological technique as well as all the chicanery and showmanship of the magician but it was enormously tempting to see what a clinical psychologist would make of it.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the extraordinary father of modern conjuring, made the salient point that ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’. This is a very good description. However, an actor takes for granted how to create drama in every word, movement and look. The average magician is barely aware of its existence.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“I should point out that I don’t condone gambling of any sort unless you can cheat very effectively and stack the odds at least ninety percent on your favour, which is essentially what I’m doing here.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

“How many powerful memories are triggered by smell and taste? Your mother’s old perfume, the smell your father’s breath, the taste of the soap they’d make you eat.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Just talking about the illogicality behind so many of these systems: Tarot cards, which are obviously very, very popular. The deck is mixed and you choose a number of cards, they’re laid out and then your fortune and fate is read from them. Of course, the interesting conundrum there is that if you did the same thing five minutes later you’d pick out very different cards so presumably your fate and the reading would be necessarily very different if it’s relying on those cards. Five minutes later it would be completely different and when there have been questions about this the answer is ‘oh, that’s because your fate changes from minute to minute’. But then you have to think, presumably, to get a Tarot reading you’d have to constantly be having a Tarot reading over and over again in order to know what the accurate situation is, if it constantly changes from minute to minute.”

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

“Language is a gift that puts lyrics to the music of our lives. Without spoken language we wouldn’t be able to say, ‘I love you’. We’d have to say ‘uuurrrgghh’ or hold up a sign. And whether it’s one person’s gentle English or another’s muddy, arrogant French, it’s our language that makes us unapproachable and difficult to understand.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“I’m here at Sandown Racecourse in Surrey. They’re expecting fifteen thousand people here today and half a million pounds to be exchanged in cash. I’m here because I’ve developed a guaranteed system for winning at the horses. This system allows me to predict twenty four hours in advance, quite openly, which horse will win in big, high profile races. Now to prove this, six weeks ago I took a woman, a random member of the public and I told her which horse was going to win in a certain race. It did win, she was intrigued. I then did it again and again and again and she started to bet larger and larger amounts of money. Now today that woman has scraped together every last penny that she can find and she’s risking it all on one final race. Is it really possible to accurately predict the winner of a horse race again and again and again? I’m going to tell you exactly how that’s done. Welcome to The System.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: The System (2008)

“Remember how you used to try and make kids turn round at school by staring at the back of their heads? And how they used to go home early crying with blood coming out of their ears?”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“I have retained a belief that it is the popular sporty kids at school who grow up to have the least interesting lives, and the unhappy young souls who develop into the most extraordinary adults. Whoever heard of a creative genius being understood as a child and well loved by his class mates? Who like to imagine an artist who emerged into adulthood content with his lot? And, conversely, how satisfying to hear that almost without exception, the untroubled, popular kids at school have ended up blandly as accountants, solicitors or ‘in IT’. Hold on, misfits, your day will come.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“The Barnum Statements are very famous and well known about and there’s a great experiment… There’s a terrific experiment that was done on this with students. I’ve filmed this myself. We did it with three different groups of people across the world, where you have… everybody in the group is given a reading, a personality reading. Normally beforehand there’s some nonsense about asking for their birth date or getting some objects off them - so there’s some sort of process apparently involved - and they’re given a reading. And it’s a long reading, it’s a very detailed personality reading and they all get one individually, they’re all asked to read it and, invariably, they will all say afterwards that it’s very, very accurate, that it was not at all vague or ambiguous or what people might expect and they’ll give it 85, 90, 95 percent accuracy. I’ve seen this happen and people are amazed by it. And then you get them to swap with each other and say “perhaps you can identify someone else by their reading”. Then they realise they’ve all been given exactly the same thing which was written months ago before I even met them and the statements that fill those sorts of readings are generally Barnum Statements. Barnum statements are things which essentially apply to anybody – this is only part of the cold-reading skill but it’s a major part of it… PT Barnum… “something for everyone” and, famously “a sucker is born every minute””

Derren Brown

Other TV and web appearances, The Enemies of Reason (Richard Dawkins)

“For a while now I have concerned myself with engaging people’s beliefs. A large part of me wishes to have people retain a scepticism about what I do and apply that to other areas in life where our beliefs are manipulated in ugly ways.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“Some people might think I could play Russian Roulette safely with a blank bullet. Our armourer took us outside to demonstrate the damage a blank causes at close range. (The demonstration showed the significant damage caused by firing a blank at a plastic bottle)”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette Live (2003)

“Even though it’s dark sometimes or it’s scary for the people involved, ultimately I always make sure they’re exhilarated by it. It’s genuinely a real pleasure to take people to that place.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“(When asked about the method for a trick where a member of the public answers a public pay-phone only to immediately slump to the floor as if asleep) I was saying ‘there’s fifty quid under the phone book. Just pretend. You’re on TV’.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Well, it took me over two hours to find Frencesco’s keys which was disappointing but I did go to Venice for free and I didn’t fall into the canal on the way home like a twat.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Frankly, I think I’m just a balding, goateed show off.”

Derren Brown

TV recordings of stage shows, Derren Brown: The Gathering (2005) based on Derren Brown: Live, Derren Brown: Live tour brochure

“Walthamstow Stadium: Where hundreds of men, who all look like my dad, come to watch some thin dogs running around.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“Not believing in something is not in itself a belief or a philosophy: it is the 'ism' at the end that tends to cause the trouble. Both atheists and believers can be as arrogant and witless as each other in frustrated debate, and people may choose strong and unapologetic words to raise awareness of the agenda. But despite the name-calling, it is still a fair point that to not believe in God is no more a 'belief in itself' than to not believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Poseidon or anything else one might personally consider far-fetched. Beyond that, there is only how you choose to express yourself.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“There is no hypnotic phenomenon, no matter how remarkable it may appear, which cannot be re-created outside of a hypnotic state through such ordinary devices such as suggestion, hype and the exercise of charisma.”

Derren Brown

TV recordings of stage shows, Svengali (2012), Svengali tour brochure

“I cannot see the word ‘troubled’ prefixing the name of some poor starlet who has been dragged through the mire of tabloid spite without vomiting directly onto the newspaper. Troubled by whom? Troubled by you, you fuckwits.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“By the end of the tonight, all but one of these students will be dead. That’s not true. I'd give them about a week.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Derren Brown: Séance (2004)

“One of the reasons I enjoy going to the Opera is the spectacle of an audience enraptured. Their emotions are engaged, their passions brought to the fore, they become highly sensitive.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.”

Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

“Dull magic is a collection of tricks: great magic should sting.”

Derren Brown

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

“Many things we misread as meaningful are quite ordinary coincidences. For example, it’s not unlikely that occasionally someone will phone you after you’ve been thinking about them. But we give these things value to make sense of our lives.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Séances lost their popularity with the invention of infrared photography when it became possible to see what mediums were doing in the dark. Nowadays, spiritualists’ fakery is more ambiguous and subtle.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“This is the comforting and lovely Leadenhall Market, an accommodating inter-mammary cleft in the bosom of old Londinium.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Our tendency to think that we're not predictable is probably one of our more predictable traits.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“The sort of ill-informed armchair moralizing that pours from the permanently outraged, Daily Mail-reading mentality is one of the more revolting and frightening aspects of our society.”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“There is a real irony to the NLPers I knew who prided themselves on their communication skills yet because of their need to let everyone know how engaging they were, they were among the least engaging”

Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“Shopping Malls: Modern cathedrals to spending money. They’re designed to disorientate us and make us stay longer than we need to. Every brick is there to manipulate us to buy.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

“In the nineteenth century, so-called ‘psychics’ were often tested by having to guess the details on a postcard sealed in an envelope. Often they did surprisingly well so i thought it would be worth presenting some modern day non-psychics with the same challenge.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“We form many of our political opinions through reading papers and unconsciously absorbing the rhetoric of the journalists. Later, we spout the same opinions as our own. This parallels the way we respond to any authority and it’s something politicians understand well.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“Some people believe that a person’s spirit is captured when they are photographed. I invite those of you who don’t believe that to take a photograph of someone you love a stab it repeatedly with a pair of scissors. Maybe they do capture something of the soul.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

“How would I describe what I do? I suppose a mixture of psychological reading and showmanship and a special form of poncing-about which kind of comes together to form the effect of thought reading and psychological influence but non, non-psychic… not ‘non-non-psychic’, non-psychic.”

Derren Brown

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

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