Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Anton Wilson - Page 4

It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called "barbarism" and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'.

There's a seeker born every minute.

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.

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

MR. KHARIS: 'Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?' MR. CELINE: 'I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?' JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: 'You become facetious, Mr. Celine.' MR. CELINE: 'I have never been more serious.

I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.

I will do anything, including highway robbery and murder, to avoid leaving my children in poverty.

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

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 variables vary too much and the constants aren't as constant as they seem.

The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty.

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

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

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

Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate.

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

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

No wife, no horse, no mustache

Each mans spills the drink he loves.

[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'

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.

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

Science, incidentally, not only ignores the question of indwelling 'essences' by looking instead at measurable relationships, but science also does not agree that knowledge is obtained through Rothbard's Medieval 'investigation by a reason,' i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed.

People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians- meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.

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

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.

I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it.

Masturbation is not the happiest form of sexuality, but the most advisable for him who wants to be alone and think.

Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.

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

What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.

I read everything, including the labels on canned food. I'm a hopeless print addict, a condition alleviated only by daily meditation which breaks the linear-Aristotelian trance. National Lampoon, Scientific American are what I read most obsessively.

I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.

He who lives happiest has forgotten most

[Red Dirt Marijuana] contains most of the great short stories in English that are not by Mr. Hemingway or Mr. O'Hara.

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.

I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me.

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

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

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.

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses - our reality-tunnels - will become.