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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'