Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

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“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.”

“Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.”

“The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.”

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

“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.”

“ONLY THE MADMAN IS ABSOLUTELY SURE.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size…)”

“Encounters with death and danger are onlyto the survivors.”

“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.”

“A true initiation never ends.”

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

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

“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.”

“I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. "Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance!"”

“Each mans spills the drink he loves.”

“And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.”

“No, they were not exactly automatons, but they did not know what they were doing. They take down a boy’s britches. They stare at his buttocks. They cane him until the buttocks bleed. And they believe this is virtue, because it is done in a school, and it becomes vice only if it is done in a place with a red lantern over the door.”

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

“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.”

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

“There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.”

“"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.”

“You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“"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).”

“Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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".”

“The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.”

“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.”

“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.”