Top 180 Robert Anton Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

2. “In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

3. “You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

4. “The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

5. “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

7. “Of course I’m crazy, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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8. “We all see only that which we are trained to see.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

9. “Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

11. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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12. “I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there’s no rational life here.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

13. “We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

14. “On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

15. “Belief is the death of intelligence.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

16. “The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you’ll see that they’re all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

17. “In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

18. “The rapists of the intellectual world become politicians; the seducers become artists.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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19. “If you want to be happy, practise it every day.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

20. “Show me a movement that doesn’t hate somebody and I will join it at once.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

21. “Only the madman is absolutely sure.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

22. “The final war will be between Pavlov’s dog and Schoedinger’s Cat.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

23. “It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

24. “The ultimate weapon isn’t this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It’s the ability to say No and take the consequences.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

26. “It’s not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don’t understand it until it makes you weep.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

27. “Communication is only possible between equals.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

28. “The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

29. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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30. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

31. “My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

34. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

35. “The Right’s view of government and the Left’s view of big business are both correct.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

36. “Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

37. “The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

38. “A true initiation never ends.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

40. “A Discordian is someone who sees windmills and thinks they might be giants.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

41. “Creativity has a touch of the bizarre.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

43. “Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

47. “We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

48. “I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

49. “There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

50. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson