Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, 'traditional family values' denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.)

I regard belief as a form of brain damage.

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

Belief Systems contradict both science and ordinary "common sense." B.S. contradicts science, because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: it can only say, "This model"- or theory, or interpretation of the data- "fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week.

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress ... the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

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

Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.

The things that hinder me are opportunities to learn more and develop further.

"Every national border in Europe," El Eswad added ironically, "marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others."

What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.

People who've been through our educational system, they think they're thinking, when they're just repeating like parrots.

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

MR. KHARIS: 'Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?' MR. CELINE: 'I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?' JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: 'You become facetious, Mr. Celine.' MR. CELINE: 'I have never been more serious.

The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.

Governments are based pincipally on force and deception. Democratic governments are based chiefly on deception, other governments on force. And democratic governments, if you get too uppity, give up on the deception and resort to brute force, as a lot of us found out in the sixites. Those who didn't find out in the sixites will find out in the near future because we're going to have a rerun.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

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

I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous.

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

You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.