Top 100 Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
#2. All Chaos was once yer kingdom; verily, held ye dominion over the entire Pentaverse, but today ye was sore afraid in dark coners, nooks, and sink holes.
Robert Anton Wilson
#3. Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.
Robert Anton Wilson
#5. Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.
Robert Anton Wilson
#6. I will do anything, including highway robbery and murder, to avoid leaving my children in poverty.
Robert Anton Wilson
#7. We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch.
Robert Anton Wilson
#8. All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: 'Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.
Robert Anton Wilson
#9. A Discordian is someone who sees windmills and thinks they might be giants
Robert Anton Wilson
#11. We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear.
Robert Anton Wilson
#13. 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
#14. Encounters with death and danger are only adventures to the survivors.
Robert Anton Wilson
#15. Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.
Robert Anton Wilson
#16. Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson
#17. If you want to become a concert pianist, do it every day. You want to be a writer, do it every day. You want to become depressed, think depressing thoughts every day. You want to become an optimist, think a cheerful thought every day. Do it every day.
Robert Anton Wilson
#18. But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.
Robert Anton Wilson
#19. Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.
Robert Anton Wilson
#20. The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles.
Robert Anton Wilson
#21. 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
#22. Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.
Robert Anton Wilson
#23. What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crisis ... and insanity is the only viable alternative.
Robert Anton Wilson
#24. Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there's a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall
Robert Anton Wilson
#25. I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it.
Robert Anton Wilson
#26. 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
#27. "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
#29. Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.
Robert Anton Wilson
#30. It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars.
Robert Anton Wilson
#32. The minority who actually loves its work seems to be made up chiefly of the writers, dancers, actors and other artists, most scientists above the technician-troll level, computer freaks, and the righteous dope-dealers of California.
Robert Anton Wilson
#33. It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.
Robert Anton Wilson
#34. I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
Robert Anton Wilson
#36. 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
#37. O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?
Robert Anton Wilson
#38. Perhaps the final secret of the Illuminati is that you don't know you're a member until it's too late to get out.
Robert Anton Wilson
#39. The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
Robert Anton Wilson
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of psychology
Robert Anton Wilson
#43. Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.
Robert Anton Wilson
#44. Mind is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors).
Robert Anton Wilson
#45. Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.
Robert Anton Wilson
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Since the Unistat primates, like other domesticated hominids, did not know they were primates, all this was explained by a ferocious amount of ink excretions invoking Morality and Ideology, the twin gods of domesticated primatedom.
Robert Anton Wilson
#49. You are a prize," Marlene said. "You really are a prize. Have you spent your whole life learning how to please women?"
"It's my life study," Starhawk said. "Everything else is just a hobby.
Robert Anton Wilson
#50. 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
#51. Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.
Robert Anton Wilson
#52. The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.
Robert Anton Wilson
#53. Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.
Robert Anton Wilson
#54. so many people have been hypnotized by Aristotelian 'yes/ no' logic to the extent that any step beyond that Bronze Age mythos seems to them a whirling, dizzying plunge into a pit of Chaos and the Dark Night of Nihilism.
Robert Anton Wilson
#55. 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
#56. The rapists of the intellectual world become politicians; the seducers become artists.
Robert Anton Wilson
#57. Stupidity is a blockage in the ability to receive, integrate and transmit new signals.
Robert Anton Wilson
#58. I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.
Robert Anton Wilson
#59. Nothing in this book is an attempt to prevent the really resolute misery addicts from continuing their pursuit of frustration and failure.
Robert Anton Wilson
#60. The Greatest thing about masturbation is that it is always available. I wager that many a condemn man has consoled himself this way during the night before his execution.
Robert Anton Wilson
#62. We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe
Robert Anton Wilson
#63. The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.
Robert Anton Wilson
#64. The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.
Robert Anton Wilson
#65. Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.
Robert Anton Wilson
#66. [Red Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O'Hara.
Robert Anton Wilson
#67. In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers.
Robert Anton Wilson
#68. My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an
impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian.
Robert Anton Wilson
#69. Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.
Robert Anton Wilson
#71. Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.
Robert Anton Wilson
#72. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.
Robert Anton Wilson
#75. The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.
Robert Anton Wilson
#76. All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.
Robert Anton Wilson
#77. Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?
Robert Anton Wilson
#78. A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to.
Robert Anton Wilson
#80. People who've been through our educational system, they think they're thinking, when they're just repeating like parrots.
Robert Anton Wilson
#81. The numbers of universes perceived by human beings does not equal the population of the planet, but several times the population of the planet. It thus appears some sort of miracle that we sometimes find it possible to communicate with each other at all, at all.
Robert Anton Wilson
#82. Here's what it is, here's what it isn't, now here's why you need to go tell everyone how smart I am.
Robert Anton Wilson
#83. 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
#84. You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.
Robert Anton Wilson
#85. 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
#86. In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.
Robert Anton Wilson
#88. It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
Robert Anton Wilson
#89. Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt ... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson
#90. Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology.
Robert Anton Wilson
#91. People's belief in their own local reality-tunnels keep us all far stupider than we ought to be ...
Robert Anton Wilson
#92. There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.
Robert Anton Wilson
#94. An optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
Robert Anton Wilson
#95. Of course there are robots among us. There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?
Robert Anton Wilson
#96. 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
#97. Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.
Robert Anton Wilson
#98. We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such.
Robert Anton Wilson
#100. Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence ...
Robert Anton Wilson
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