Robert Anton Wilson famous quotes

The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Slavery #Fear Of Death

If the oncoming mutation to interstellar immortality is screwed up by the politicians, it will be because those of us who see the opportunities in modern science are not adroit enough to outmaneuver the forces of inertia, stupidity and greed. Well, if we're not intelligent enough to overcome such obstacles, then we don't deserve to carry off the mutation at this stage of evolution.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Intelligent #Opportunity #Stupidity

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Depression #Crazy #Mean

I read at least one periodical every month by a political group I dislike - to keep some sense of balance. The overwhelming stupidity of political movements is caused by the fact that political types never read anything but their own gang's agit-prop.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Stupidity #Political #Balance

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Believe #Suspicion

Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Sorry #Hippie #Feelings

In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Pain #Ignorance #Passion

The things that hinder me are opportunities to learn more and develop further.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Opportunity #Hinder

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Block #Reality #Tunnels

Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Book #Writing #People

Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Crazy #Today #United States

Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Silly #Genius #Dogma

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Grief #Men #Anxiety

I read everything, including the labels on canned food. I'm a hopeless print addict, a condition alleviated only by daily meditation which breaks the linear-Aristotelian trance. National Lampoon, Scientific American are what I read most obsessively.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Meditation #Labels #Hopeless

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Intelligent #Jail #Choices

Robert A. Heinlein has been an idol to me for more than 20 years. He can do no wrong, no matter how much he loves wars and hates pacifists.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#War #Hate #Years

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Metaphor #Constructs

I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Philosophy #Government #People

Only the madman is absolutely sure.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Inspirational #Skepticism #Madmen

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Mirrors #Cheerful #Would Be

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Reality #Dope #Data

You can "prove" anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Levels #Accepting #Prove

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Path #Way #Universe

The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Real #Our World #Devil

Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Certain #Process #Universe

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Men #Discovery #Innovation

Voting wouldn't excite me unless it included electing the directors of the big banks and corporations, who make the real decisions that affect our lives. It's hard to get excited about the trained seals in Washington.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Real #Decision #Voting

The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Stupid #Too Much #Common

The land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody "owns" the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Stars #Moon #Land

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Believe #Creativity #Writing

I will do anything, including highway robbery and murder, to avoid leaving my children in poverty.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Children #Leaving #Poverty

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Attitude #Reality #Tunnels

I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Causes #Misery #Morality

Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Truth #People #Dare

I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Math #Views #Engineering

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#God #Atheist #Philosophy

I like pacifists and people who have a heavy emotional identification with deathism and war would probably call me a pacifist, but I am a non-invasivist rather than a non-violentist. That is, I believe that an invaded people have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. This includes putting ground glass or poison in the invaders' food, shooting at them from ambush, sabotage, the general strike, armed revolution, etc. It's up to the invaded to decide which of these techniques they will use. It's not up to some moralist to tell them which techniques are permissible.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#War #Believe #Mean

You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me... It's called senility.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Government #Getting High #Way

I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Beautiful #Mean #Support

Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#War #Spine #Overrated

Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Editors #Brain #Firsts

Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody and I will join it at once.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Hate #Liberty #Movement

Every nervous system creates its own "reality," minute by minute - we live inside a "bubble" of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. You can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Reality #Bored #Facts

There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Taken #World #Granted

It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Stars #Shining #Privilege

You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Believe #People #Ridiculous

Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don’t even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Believe #Ignorance #Reality

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Real #Rivals #Lasts

Is," "is," "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Might #Moments #Appearance

A disciple is an ***** looking for a human being to attach itself to.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Disciple #Humans

...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Philosophy #Optimistic #Mind

"Every national border in Europe," El Eswad added ironically, "marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others."
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Europe #Two #Patriotism

Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Squares #Miracle #Church

I regard belief as a form of brain damage.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Brain #Religion #Damage

In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Goes On #Conclusion

No wife, no horse, no mustache
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Horse #Wife #Mustache

We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Wise #Secret #Enlightenment

In summary, Intelligence Intensification is desirable, because there is not a single problem confronting humanity that is not either caused or considerably worsened by the prevailing stupidity (insensitivity) of the species: badly wired robots bumping into and maiming and killing each other.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Stupidity #Humanity #Robots

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Sex #Roles #Machines

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Faith #Believe #Thinking

Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Running #Army #People

What the thinker thinks, the prover proves
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Motivational #Thinking #Thinker

I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance! just doesn't cut it….
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Atheist #Cutting #Random Chance

We all see only that which we are trained to see.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Reality #Fantasy #Endure

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Running #Thinking #Views

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Communication #Mean #Power

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Dumb #Belief #Blind

Pregnancy is a kind of miracle. Especially so in that it proves that a man and woman can conspire to force God to create a new soul.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Pregnancy #Men #Miracle

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Civilization #Keys #Political

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence....
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Size #Existence #Models

To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Taken #Intelligent #Government

Every morning I have been looking at CNN to see if there is any reason for hope . I see a few large and impressive peace protests here and there around the world, but mostly I see empty robot faces monotonously reciting the magic incantations, "We must support the President" and "We must support our troops", both of which mean the killing must continue.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Morning #Mean #Cnn

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Perfect #Gentleman #Majority

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Money #Weapons #Taxation

The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Song #Earth #Easier

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Religious #War #Liars

Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Animal #Paper #Territory

When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Marriage #Drama #Rose

Belief is the death of intelligence.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Faith #Atheist #Believe

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Different #Fiction #Groups

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Cynical #Cynic #Idealist

...reality is always plural and mutable.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Reality

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Ego #Fiction #Blame

The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Struggle #Mad #Interesting

Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#World #Corporations #Politician

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Christian #Liars #Differences

In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, 'traditional family values' denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.)
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Children #Dad #Hate

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Business #Government #Views

The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Responsibility #Learning #Creating

Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers.
-- Robert Anton Wilson

#Struggle #Reality #Rivals