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Derren Brown citations
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Derren Brown est un illusionniste, mentaliste et hypnotiseur anglais, connu notamment pour ses spectacles sur la chaîne britannique Channel 4. Ses spectacles, Mind Control et Trick of the Mind sont basés sur une combinaison de tours d'illusionnisme et de suggestions. Depuis la première diffusion de son spectacle Derren Brown: Mind Control en 2000, Brown a gagné en notoriété grâce à ses tours de magie spectaculaires, il fit même une apparition dans la série "Sherlock", jouant son propre rôle. Il a également écrit des livres pour les magiciens ainsi que pour le grand public. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. février 1971
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Derren Brown: 136   citations 0   J'aime

Derren Brown: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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?”

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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.”

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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””

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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.”

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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)”

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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.”

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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’.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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Derren Brown

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

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

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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Derren Brown

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“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.”

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Derren Brown

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

“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”

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Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

“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.”

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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.”

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Derren Brown

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