Best 200 quotes of Robert Anton Wilson on MyQuotes

Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology.

A Discordian is someone who sees windmills and thinks they might be giants

All Chaos was once yer kingdom; verily, held ye dominion over the entire Pentaverse, but today ye was sore afraid in dark coners, nooks, and sink holes.

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

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.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.

And as a matter of fact, governments don't act, governments only react. The bankers make the decisions, and then governments decide how are we going to adjust to this. Government can't do anything unless the bank gives them the money to do it.

An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.

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

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

Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.

Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy.

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.

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.

Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.

Belief Systems contradict both science and ordinary "common sense." B.S. contradicts science, because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: it can only say, "This model"- or theory, or interpretation of the data- "fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week.

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

Blue uniforms are real. Cops are a social fiction

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.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.

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.

Christianity is alone in thinking that sex is entirely the Devil's business and an offence to God, This is a strange doctrine and almost implies that God and the devil must have collaborated on the creation of humanity, God working above the belly button and the Devil below.

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

Creativity has a touch of the bizarre

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

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.

Disobedience was man's Original Virtue.

Each mans spills the drink he loves.

Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse.

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

"Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.

Entropy requires no maintenance.

Everybody who has ever worked for a corporation knows that corporations conspire all the time. Politicians conspire all the time, pot-dealers conspire not to get caught by the narcs, the world is full of conspiracies. Conspiracy is natural primate behavior.

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.

Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don’t even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.

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.

Every nervous system creates its own "reality," minute by minute - we live inside a "bubble" of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. You can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again.

Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size).

Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.

Governments are based pincipally on force and deception. Democratic governments are based chiefly on deception, other governments on force. And democratic governments, if you get too uppity, give up on the deception and resort to brute force, as a lot of us found out in the sixites. Those who didn't find out in the sixites will find out in the near future because we're going to have a rerun.

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?

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

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

Here's to the good Nuns for telling me what books NOT to read!

He who lives happiest has forgotten most

Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves.

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

How many times... have you encountered the saying, 'When the student is ready, the Master speaks?' Do you know why that is true? The door opens inward. The Master is everywhere, but the student has to open his mind to hear the Masters Voice.