Robert Anton Wilson Quotes - Page 5

The secret to my success has been optimism tempered by anger.

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.

I like pacifists and people who have a heavy emotional identification with deathism and war would probably call me a pacifist, but I am a non-invasivist rather than a non-violentist. That is, I believe that an invaded people have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. This includes putting ground glass or poison in the invaders' food, shooting at them from ambush, sabotage, the general strike, armed revolution, etc. It's up to the invaded to decide which of these techniques they will use. It's not up to some moralist to tell them which techniques are permissible.

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.)

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).

We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

A true initiation never ends.

I've recently noticed "as if for the first time" that when people pray they always look "upward" - i.e. perpendicular to whatever place they're standing - or kneeling or groveling. I deduce that they conceive of their "god" as topologically isomorphic to a huge donut, about a thousand miles wider than Earth.

Stupidity is a blockage in the ability to receive, integrate and transmit new signals.

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anybody.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.

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?

Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?

The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

You can "prove" anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning.

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.

There's a great universe just next door.

Entropy requires no maintenance.

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.