Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

"I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions:

Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices.

Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?"

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.)

A chicken is the egg’s way of making more eggs.

What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crisis...and insanity is the only viable alternative.

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

No wife, no horse, no mustache

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

A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to.

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

I worked, long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at a time. But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie screen. They play roles. And their leaders are not like our leaders. They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished. Then, also, the leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy. They speak from somewhere else. They act from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not know. It is, I think, a kind of insanity.

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

Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship.

As Dr. Leonard Orr has noted, the human mind behaves as if it were divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover.

The Thinker can think about virtually anything.
(...) The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. To cite a notorious example which unleashed incredible horrors earlier in this century, if the Thinker thinks that all Jews are rich, the Prover will prove it. It will find evidence that the poorest Jew in the most run-down ghetto has hidden money somewhere. Similarly, Feminists are able to believe that all men, including the starving wretches who live and sleep on the streets, are exploiting all women, including the Queen of England.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

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.