Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities.

— Robert Anton Wilson

“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”

— 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

“Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons”

— Robert Anton Wilson

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

— Robert Anton Wilson

“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

“Encounters with death and danger are only adventures to the survivors.”

— 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

“What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crisis ... and insanity is the only viable alternative.”

— 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

“There is no complete theory of anything.”

— 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

“Nothing is too heavy to be knocked on its ass, and everything is cool, baby.
Hassan i Sabbah X”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“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

“There is one universal sex law: Sex shall not be unregulated.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“Only the madman is absolutely sure.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

“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

“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

“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

We're trapped in linguistic constructs ... all that is is metaphor.

— Robert Anton Wilson

“We can't run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“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

“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

We live in our myths, we only endure reality.

— Robert Anton Wilson

“It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“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

“I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“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

“Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“We're living on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny or serious?”

— Robert Anton Wilson

Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate.

— Robert Anton Wilson

“It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called "barbarism" and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'.”

— 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

“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

“The secret to my success has been optimism tempered by anger.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“The rapists of the intellectual world become politicians; the seducers become artists.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately
represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty.”

— 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

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft (" GOD ") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

— Robert Anton Wilson

“I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it.”

— 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