Robert Anton Wilson Quotes - Page 4

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

I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.

Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous YES.

We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.

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

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

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.

The land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody "owns" the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves.

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

...reality is always plural and mutable.

You know what family values means, that's hating the same people your grandfather hated.

There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

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

We're living on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny or serious?

Every morning I have been looking at CNN to see if there is any reason for hope. I see a few large and impressive peace protests here and there around the world, but mostly I see empty robot faces monotonously reciting the magic incantations, "We must support the President" and "We must support our troops," both of which mean the killing must continue.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch.

You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me... It's called senility.

My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons

It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

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