110+ Robert Anton Wilson Quotes On World, Universe And Ww1

Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, novelist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, and self-described agnostic mystic. He is best known for his science fiction and popular philosophy works, including the Illuminatus! Trilogy and Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. He was an advocate of libertarianism, a proponent of the free press, and an ardent critic of political correctness, mainstream education, and the mass media. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Anton Wilson on life, love, leadership.

Top 10 Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

1. The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning.
2. 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.
3. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
4. You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.
5. Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.
6. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.
7. Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
8. My own opinion is that 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.
9. 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.
10. I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

Robert Anton Wilson Short Quotes

• Try living forever with the metaprogram, 'Everything works out more perfectly than I plan it.
• I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.
• We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear.
• Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons
• Only the madman is absolutely sure.
• Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.
• No wife, no horse, no mustache
• Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.
• Belief is the death of intelligence.
• Entropy requires no maintenance.

Robert Anton Wilson Quotes About Life

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson Quotes About Love

Robert A. Heinlein has been an idol to me for more than 20 years. He can do no wrong, no matter how much he loves wars and hates pacifists. — Robert Anton Wilson

The minority who actually loves its work seems to be made up chiefly of the writers, dancers, actors and other artists, most scientists above the technician-troll level, computer freaks, and the righteous dope-dealers of California. — Robert Anton Wilson

Each mans spills the drink he loves. — Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson Quotes About World

Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don’t even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality. — 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

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

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

The rapists of the intellectual world become politicians; the seducers become artists. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

Robert Anton Wilson Quotes About Universe

Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

There's a great universe just next door. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

Robert Anton Wilson Quotes About Single

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

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

In summary, Intelligence Intensification is desirable, because there is not a single problem confronting humanity that is not either caused or considerably worsened by the prevailing stupidity (insensitivity) of the species: badly wired robots bumping into and maiming and killing each other. — Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission. — 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

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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? — 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

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.) — Robert Anton Wilson

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

I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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…. — Robert Anton Wilson

The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it. — Robert Anton Wilson

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics). — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — 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

Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous YES. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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. — 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

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — 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

"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

The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

Every nervous system creates its own "reality," minute by minute - we live inside a "bubble" of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. You can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again. — 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

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

A true initiation never ends. — Robert Anton Wilson

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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. — 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

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities. — Robert Anton Wilson

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense. — Robert Anton Wilson

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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

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

You know what family values means, that's hating the same people your grandfather hated. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars. — Robert Anton Wilson

The things that hinder me are opportunities to learn more and develop further. — Robert Anton Wilson

The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

The Grail is the womb of the beloved. — Robert Anton Wilson

I regard belief as a form of brain damage. — Robert Anton Wilson

... 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. — Robert Anton Wilson

It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep. — 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

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

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe. — 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

If you want to be happy, practise it every day — Robert Anton Wilson

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.) — Robert Anton Wilson

Reality is what you can get away with. — Robert Anton Wilson

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 — Robert Anton Wilson

Life Lessons by Robert Anton Wilson

1. Robert Anton Wilson taught us to embrace the power of imagination and to question the status quo. He also encouraged us to think independently and to never be afraid to challenge authority.
2. He believed that knowledge is power and that it should be shared freely, and he championed the importance of understanding different perspectives.
3. He also taught us to be open to new ideas and to never stop learning, no matter how old we get.