Robert Anton Wilson Quotes - Page 7

Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of “psychology

...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

There is no complete theory of anything.

Robert A. Heinlein has been an idol to me for more than 20 years. He can do no wrong, no matter how much he loves wars and hates pacifists.

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit.

Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.

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

My early work is politically anarchist fiction, in that I was an anarchist for a long period of time. I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal. Nowadays, I regard myself as a libertarian.

I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.

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.

The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy.

He who lives happiest has forgotten most

People's belief in their own local reality-tunnels keep us all far stupider than we ought to be.

Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time.

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours.

If you don't laugh at all, you've missed the point. If you only laugh, you've missed your chance from illumination.

To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.