Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

“A disciple is an *sshole looking for a human being to attach itself to.”

“Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.”

“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent.”

“Every national border in Europe 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.”

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

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

“Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities.”

“Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.”

“I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”

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

“If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality. Authority exists when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when one man do not obey other men.”

“In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Submission is identified not with cowardliness, but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism, but with evil.”

“Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“To the Roman slave owners, Spartacus was not the hero and obedient slaves were not cowards. Spartacus was not a hero, and obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also.”

“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.”