Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.

Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.

There is no complete theory of anything.

[Red Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O'Hara.

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

A true initiation never ends.

Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves.

Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We live in our myths, we only endure reality.

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.

I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

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.

He who lives happiest has forgotten most

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

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.

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous YES.

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

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

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.

People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians- meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.

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

The Grail is the womb of the beloved.

The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

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.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

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

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.

part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations.

Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy.

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

Reality is what you can get away with.

Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anybody.

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.

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons

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.

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

If you want to be happy, practise it every day

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

Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.

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.