Robert Anton Wilson Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses - our reality-tunnels - will become. — Robert Anton Wilson

We're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from. All the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we're willing to listen. — Robert Anton Wilson

Father Ratti had often explained, in Religious Knowledge class, that true humility did not mean a sense of worthlessness or the kind of timidity that caused some people to be cheated and bullied all their lives. The virtue of humility, Ratti said, was merely the faculty of intelligence operating properly "The man of wisdom," Ratti explained once, "fears only one man on earth. Do you know who that is?" And when everybody guessed wrong - some said the Pope, some said King Ferdinand - Ratti said, "The man of wisdom fears himself. He knows who it is who tells him the most plausible lies, the lies he wants to believe. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

The only intelligent way to discuss politics is
on all fours. — Robert Anton Wilson

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existencial/operacional probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to ivent fictitious certainties.
That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damn near all Religions on the planet, I think. — Robert Anton Wilson

All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts - as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

That night he wrote in his diary, "Challenge a remaining taboo." It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo "Thou shalt not question Aristotle." Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo. — Robert Anton Wilson

belief is the death of intelligence. — Robert Anton Wilson

We have never sought power. We have sought to disperse power, to set men and women free. That really means: to help them to discover that they are free. Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can break the bottle at any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry. It's right out in the open all the time. — Robert Anton Wilson

I'm sorry There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool. — Robert Anton Wilson

It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

We can't run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something. — Robert Anton Wilson

My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. — Robert Anton Wilson

Ipsum Nomen Res Ipsa: The Name Itself is the Thing Itself. I.N.R.I.: Isis, Apophis, Osiris: IAO. — Robert Anton Wilson

We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

There is a Zen story (very funny - ha-ha) about a monk who, having failed to achieve "enlightenment" (brain-change) through the normal Zen methods, was told by his teacher to think of nothing but an ox. Day after day after day, the monk thought of the ox, visualized the ox, meditated on the ox. Finally, one day, the teacher came to the monk's cell and said, "Come out here - I want to talk to you." "I can't get out," the monk said. "My horns won't fit through the door." I can't get out . . . At these words, the monk was "enlightened." Never mind what "enlightenment" means, right now. The monk went through some species of brain change, obviously. He had developed the delusion that he was an ox, and awakening from that hypnoidal state he saw through the mechanism of all other delusions and how they robotize us. EXERCIZES — Robert Anton Wilson

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

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

How many times ... have you encountered the saying, 'When the student is ready, the Master speaks?' Do you know why that is true? The door opens inward. The Master is everywhere, but the student has to open his mind to hear the Masters Voice. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities. — Robert Anton Wilson

You know what family values means, that's hating the same people your grandfather hated. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

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

The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning. — Robert Anton Wilson

"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

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM! — Robert Anton Wilson

Nothing is too heavy to be knocked on its ass, and everything is cool, baby.
Hassan i Sabbah X — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.'
'What sort of tools?'
'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason - or are manipulated into reasoning - that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted. — Robert Anton Wilson

It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep. — Robert Anton Wilson

When you're dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth only for one place and one time, and that's a truth, as I said, for the armchair. When you're actually dealing with these figures, the only safe, pragmatic and operational approach is to treat them as having a being, a will, and a purpose entirely apart from the humans who evoke them. If the Sorcerer's Apprentice had understood that, he wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble. — Robert Anton Wilson

G.W.F. Hegel. "He's perfect," Weishaupt wrote ... "Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language. — Robert Anton Wilson

I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. — Robert Anton Wilson

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists. — Robert Anton Wilson

Part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations. — Robert Anton Wilson

To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

Belief Systems contradict both science and ordinary "common sense." B.S. contradicts science, because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: it can only say, "This model"- or theory, or interpretation of the data- "fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

The Grail is the womb of the beloved. — Robert Anton Wilson

Reality is what you can get away with. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise, and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter's sleep under the dust? — Robert Anton Wilson

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

What a fantastic piece of hot lustful woman she was, Roger thought irrelevantly. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. — Robert Anton Wilson

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as"expropriating the expropriators," "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty," "they did it to me so I can do it to them," and, in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero" (1 + 1 = 0).

The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc. — Robert Anton Wilson

Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above. — Robert Anton Wilson

He who lives happiest has forgotten most — Robert Anton Wilson

A chicken is the egg's way of making more eggs. — Robert Anton Wilson

I can summarize my thoughts now by simply saying each must find his or her own Way because "the way" does not exist. — Robert Anton Wilson

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another.
After the 6th candy bar a man on the bench across from him said Son you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give you acne rot your teeth and make you fat.
Little Tony replied My grandfather lived to be 107 years old.
The man asked Did you grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time
Little Tony answered No he minded his own fucking business. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

You know the difference between right and wrong,' he repeated finally. 'Man, why did you need Initiation - by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity - the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have ever agreed, and no two men or women have ever agreed, and no intelligent person has ever agreed totally with himself from one day to the next. You know the difference between right and wrong. I am overawed. I swoon. I figuratively kiss your feet. — Robert Anton Wilson

When dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. — Robert Anton Wilson

I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots. — Robert Anton Wilson

Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey. — Robert Anton Wilson

I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

Hysteria is a chaotic and irrational emotional state caused by seeing how the world really operates. — Robert Anton Wilson

Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities. — Robert Anton Wilson