Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

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.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons

Entropy requires no maintenance.

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 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."

Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise, and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter's sleep under the dust?

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.

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

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

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

"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."

Masturbation is not the happiest form of sexuality, but the most advisable for him who wants to be alone and think. I detect the aroma of this pleasant vice in most philosophers, and a happily married logicians is almost a contradiction in terms. So many sages have regarded Woman as temptress because fornication often leads to marriage, which usually leads to children, which always leads to a respectable job and pretending to believe the idiocies your neighbors believe. The hypocrisy of the sages has been to conceal their timid onanism and call it celibacy.

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.