Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

“All experience is a muddle, until we make a model to explain it. The model can clarify the muddles, but the model is never the muddle itself. The map is not the territory; the menu does not taste like the meal.”

“All that we 'know' is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.”

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

“Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: Go forward to the nourishing, the protective, or go back, away from the threatening, the predatory.”

“As psychiatrists and psychologists have often observed (much to the chagrin of their medical colleagues), the thinker can think itself sick, and can even think itself well again.”

“Believe it possible that you can float off the ground and fly by merely willing it. See what happens.”

“Believe that you can exceed all your previous ambitions and hopes in all areas of your life.”

“Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets.”

“Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.”

“Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.”

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

“If the thinker thinks 'holy water' from Lourdes will cure its lumbago, the Prover will skillfully orchestrate all signals from the glands, muscles, organs etc. until they have organized themselves into good health again.”

“If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.”

“Imagine that you are a monkey and you’re running along a path past a rock and unexpectedly meet face to face another animal. Now, before you know whether to attack it, to flee it, or to ignore it, you must make a series of decisions. Is it monkey or non-monkey? If non-monkey, is it pro-monkey or anti-monkey? If monkey, is it male or female? If female, is she interested? If male, is it adult or juvenile? If adult, is it of my group or some other? You have about one fifth of a second to make all these decisions, or you could be attacked.”

“In the short run, Orr’s law always holds: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove.”

“Scientists, however, are still believed to be objective. No study of the lives of the great scientists will confirm this. They were as passionate, and hence as prejudiced, as any assembly of great painters or great musicians. It was not just the Church but also the established astronomers of the time who condemned Galileo. The majority of physicists rejected Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory in 1905. Einstein himself would not accept anything in quantum theory after 1920 no matter how many experiments supported it. Edison’s commitment to direct current (DC) electrical generators led him to insist alternating current (AC) generators were unsafe for years after their safety had been proven to everyone else.”

“The baby-functions of playing with one’s own body, another’s body and the environment continue throughout life in all animals. This 'playfulness' is a marked characteristic of all conspicuously healthy individuals of the sort Maslow calls 'self-actualizers'.”

“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.”

“The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is that intelligent men and women will regard the government with fear and loathing. The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself. The infinite regress again appears.”

“The prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the thinker thinks, the prover proves.”

“There is a Zen story (very funny — ha-ha) about a monk who, having failed to achieve 'enlightenment' (brain-change) through the normal Zen methods, was told by his teacher to think of nothing but an ox. Day after day after day, the monk thought of the ox, visualized the ox, meditated on the ox. Finally, one day, the teacher came to the monk’s cell and said, “Come out here — I want to talk to you.” “I can’t get out,” the monk said. “My horns won’t fit through the door. I can’t get out."

At these words, the monk was 'enlightened'. Never mind what 'enlightenment' means, right now. The monk went through some species of brain change, obviously. He had developed the delusion that he was an ox, and awakening from that hypnoidal state he saw through the mechanism of all other delusions and how they robotize us.”

“Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.”

“When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common. I say 'meow' and you say 'Bow-wow', and each of us is convinced the other is a bit dumb.”