Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Robert Anton Wilson
It only takes twenty years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Robert Anton Wilson
Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

Robert Anton Wilson
The variables vary too much and the constants aren't as constant as they seem.

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

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

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

Robert Anton Wilson
It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
I first heard of the 23 Enigma from William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark's ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
No, they were not exactly automatons, but they did not know what they were doing. They take down a boy's britches. They stare at his buttocks. They cane him until the buttocks bleed. And they believe this is virtue, because it is done in a school, and it becomes vice only if it is done in a place with a red lantern over the door.

Robert Anton Wilson
Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

Robert Anton Wilson
"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."

Robert Anton Wilson
We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear. The government has been paying farmers not to grow food for fifty years—while millions starve. Labor unions, business and government conspire to hold back the Microprocessor Revolution—because none of them know how to deal with the massive unemployment it will cause. (Fuller's books could tell them.) The utilities advertise continually that "solar power is at least forty years in the future" when my friend Karl Hess, and hundreds of others, already live in largely solar-powered houses. These propaganda advertisements are just a delaying action, because the utilities still haven't figured out how to put a meter between us and the sun.

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size...)

Robert Anton Wilson
I think government should be treated like religion, everyone should be able to pick the kind they like. Only it should be contractual not obligatory.

Robert Anton Wilson
Nothing in this book is an attempt to prevent the really resolute misery addicts from continuing their pursuit of frustration and failure.

Robert Anton Wilson