Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

76 Sourced Quotes

Why does the sexual appetite cause so much unspeakable joy and irrational misery, so much suicidal and homicidal madness, and so much absurd theological ranting? Because every sexual choice is going to play a role in determining the temperament and talents of the next generation, and of all future generations who will inherit the earth from us. To be simple about it for once, a single friendly fuck can fill a continent with morons or geniuses in only a few thousand years.

Robert Anton Wilson
There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

Robert Anton Wilson
An optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become. Resistance to new information, however, has a strong neurological foundation in all animals, as indicated by studies of imprinting and conditioning. Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan.

Robert Anton Wilson
We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

Robert Anton Wilson
Instead of governments we should have contractual associations that you can opt out of if you don't like the way the association is going.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
Everyone has a belief system, B. S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone's B. S. too seriously, especially your own.

Robert Anton Wilson
The current rampages of territorial-emotional pugnacity sweeping this planet are not just another civilization failing … They are the birth-pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of domesticated primate history.

Robert Anton Wilson
I sometimes call myself a libertarian but that's only because most people don't know what anarchist means.

Robert Anton Wilson
The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

Robert Anton Wilson
Many tribal peoples have both all-male and all-female secret societies, which help maintain the cultural values or reality tunnel.

Robert Anton Wilson
The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now.

Robert Anton Wilson
The illusion of Sin and Guilt, the madness of our species, is the act of cursing the world under the misapprehension that one is cursing only one part of it. To curse the fig tree, as in the funniest and most misunderstood parable of Jesus, is to curse the soil in which it grew, the seed, the rains, the sun; the whole world, eventually — because no part is truly separate from the whole. The fallacy is that one can judge the part in isolation from the whole is "the Lie that all men believe."

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
Mind and its contents are functionally identical: My wife only exists, for me, in my mind. Not being a solipsist, I recognize the converse: I only exist, for her, in her mind. Lest the reader exclaim, like Byron of Wordworth, "I wish he would explain his explanation!", let us try it this way: If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, "Who are you?" would be to hum the Hammerklavier. For, with music of that quality, one is hypnotized into rapt attention: there is no division between "me" and "my experience".

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

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.

Robert Anton Wilson
"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.

Robert Anton Wilson
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.

Robert Anton Wilson
Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.

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

Robert Anton Wilson
"Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors).

Robert Anton Wilson