Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

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

I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive.

There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.

I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me.

Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers.

Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there’s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall

...reality is always plural and mutable.

The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy.

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.

Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.

If you don't laugh at all, you've missed the point. If you only laugh, you've missed your chance from illumination.

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….

Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody and I will join it at once.

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.

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

Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology.

You can "prove" anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning.

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

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

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.

Try living forever with the metaprogram, 'Everything works out more perfectly than I plan it.

Christianity is alone in thinking that sex is entirely the Devil's business and an offence to God, This is a strange doctrine and almost implies that God and the devil must have collaborated on the creation of humanity, God working above the belly button and the Devil below.

I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread.

[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.'

A Discordian is someone who sees windmills and thinks they might be giants

I've recently noticed "as if for the first time" that when people pray they always look "upward" - i.e. perpendicular to whatever place they're standing - or kneeling or groveling. I deduce that they conceive of their "god" as topologically isomorphic to a huge donut, about a thousand miles wider than Earth.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

There's a great universe just next door.

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.

No wife, no horse, no mustache

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

If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?

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.

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

Only the madman is absolutely sure.

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

The final war will be between Pavlov's dog and Schoedinger's Cat.

"Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.

"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.

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

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.

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.

And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.