Derren Brown: Trending quotes

“(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

Question

“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)

Life , People , Way , Parting

“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)

Communication , Understanding

“(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

Money , Books , Family , Hope

“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)

Law , Sex , Universe

“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)

God , People , Question

“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)

“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)

Way , Feeling , Housing

“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)

“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)

Truth

“[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)

War , People , World , Nature

“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)

People , Truth , Way , Thinking

“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)

People , Fools , Thinking

“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)

Sense , Personality

“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)

People , Way , Forgiveness , Success