Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?

Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church.

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

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.

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.

Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars.

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

The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.

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).

There's a seeker born every minute.

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

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.

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)

Belief is the death of intelligence.

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.

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.

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.

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

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.

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.

Masturbation is not the happiest form of sexuality, but the most advisable for him who wants to be alone and think.

Each mans spills the drink he loves.

Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.

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.

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

You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.

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.

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

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.

Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.

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.

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.

Entropy requires no maintenance.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

I will do anything, including highway robbery and murder, to avoid leaving my children in poverty.

Creativity has a touch of the bizarre

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.

Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information - that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/ conditioned reality-tunnel

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

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.

There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.