Top 180 Robert Anton Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

54. “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

55. “The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

56. “If it’s true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?”

— Robert Anton Wilson

57. “We can’t run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

58. “I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

60. “The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

61. “You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

62. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

63. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

65. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

67. “Perhaps the final secret of the Illuminati is that you don’t know you’re a member until it’s too late to get out.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

69. “Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don’t take crap from anybody.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

70. “The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

71. “Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

72. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

74. “I’ve never been afraid of the American Nazi Party, on the grounds that anybody dumb enough to pick a name like that is not a serious threat. Any real fascist movement that’s a threat, that’s serious and really endangers us, would call itself the Red, White, and Blue Christian American Party, or something like that. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to call themselves Nazis.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

75. “Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, “My current model” – or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel – “contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.” In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

76. “The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

77. “The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

78. “The variables vary too much and the constants aren’t as constant as they seem.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

80. “There’s a seeker born every minute.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

81. “Pregnancy is a kind of miracle. Especially so in that it proves that a man and woman can conspire to force God to create a new soul.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

82. “The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

83. “We’re living on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny or serious?”

— Robert Anton Wilson

84. “The abandoned infant’s cry is rage, not fear.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

85. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

86. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

88. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

89. “Blue uniforms are real. Cops are a social fiction.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

90. “I regard belief as a form of brain damage.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

91. “We’re trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

92. “Here’s to the good Nuns for telling me what books NOT to read!”

— Robert Anton Wilson

93. “Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

94. “The minority who actually loves its work seems to be made up chiefly of the writers, dancers, actors and other artists, most scientists above the technician-troll level, computer freaks, and the righteous dope-dealers of California.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

95. “Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there’d be no more wars.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

96. “I’m sorry There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

98. “I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

99. “Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there’s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

100. “Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.”

— Robert Anton Wilson