Robert Anton Wilson Quotations

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.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

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

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

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.

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

The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

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.

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.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.

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.

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

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

There is one universal sex law: Sex shall not be unregulated.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

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

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

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

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

Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.

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

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.

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

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

I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread.

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

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

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

You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me... It's called senility.

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

An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

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

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.

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal.

The average is that which no person quite ever is.

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.

It's only possible to see people when one is able to see the world as others see it.

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

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

The Grail is the womb of the beloved.

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

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

Cynics regard everybody as equally corrupt... idealists regard everybody equally corrupt, except themselves.

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

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

I read everything, including the labels on canned food. I'm a hopeless print addict, a condition alleviated only by daily meditation which breaks the linear-Aristotelian trance. National Lampoon, Scientific American are what I read most obsessively.

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

I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.

There's a seeker born every minute.

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

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.

[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.'

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

... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit.

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.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

There is no complete theory of anything.

The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences.

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.

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.

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.

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.

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

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.

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

Each mans spills the drink he loves.

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 .

There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody 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.

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.

We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch.

Here's to the good Nuns for telling me what books NOT to read!

Blue uniforms are real. Cops are a social fiction

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

The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world.

The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty.

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.

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.

Science, incidentally, not only ignores the question of indwelling 'essences' by looking instead at measurable relationships, but science also does not agree that knowledge is obtained through Rothbard's Medieval 'investigation by a reason,' i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed.

Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?

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.

My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian.

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

We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear.

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

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

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

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

It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called "barbarism" and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'.

Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.

The secret to my success has been optimism tempered by anger.

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.

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.

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

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.