Top 180 Robert Anton Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

103. “The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

104. “History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

105. “Gentlemen, all the so-called recreational drugs that have come into wide use in the last few decades may be chemical shock devices. I think people are bleaching out their old imprints, and accidentally making new ones, when they think they’re just getting high and having fun.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

106. “He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

107. “The Grail is the womb of the beloved.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

108. “You know what family values means, that’s hating the same people your grandfather hated.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

109. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

110. “The things that hinder me are opportunities to learn more and develop further.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

111. “I do not dare assert that the “one” is actually a conscious mind in the same way that each of us is a conscious mind. It is found through the unconscious, and unconscious it probably is in essence. I can understand why many, bowled over by this experience, call it “God,” but I still feel that all ideas of God are only symbols of the experience itself.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

112. “In almost all other professions a man must be able to observe carefully and report accurately what he has seen. Those qualifications are unnecessary for journalists, however, since their job is to write sensational stories that sell newspapers.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

113. “The numbers of universes perceived by human beings does not equal the population of the planet, but several times the population of the planet. It thus appears some sort of miracle that we sometimes find it possible to communicate with each other at all, at all.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

114. “Now you know how I fooled you,” he would say. “Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn’t self-imposed: you are all absolutely free.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

115. “Hippies generally aren’t busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

116. “Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

117. “Miracles, like all other things,” he said, “come out of the Void for no reason and return to the Void for no reason. Wait. Be patient. Pay attention to the little details. And see what comes out of the Void next.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

118. “Nothing in this book is an attempt to prevent the really resolute misery addicts from continuing their pursuit of frustration and failure.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

119. “People ignore the quantum maybe because they have largely never heard of quantum logic or Transactional Psychology, but they also ignore it because traditional politics and religion have conditioned people for millenniums – and still train them today – to act with intolerance and premature certainty.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

120. “Thus, we can name our two heads – we have a “real” head outside the perceived universe and a “perceived head” inside the perceived universe, and our “real” head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

121. “I am not a donkey to be led by the carrot of salvation and the stick of damnation without thinking of where they are driving me and what they are making me do.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

122. “Of course, it is fairly easy to see that other people’s minds operate this way; it is comparatively much harder to become aware that one’s own mind is working that way also.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

123. “No wife, no horse, no mustache.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

124. “When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

125. “Entropy requires no maintenance.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

126. “The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

127. “There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

128. “Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

129. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

130. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

131. “The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

132. “How to evolve? Read my book Prometheus Rising, and do all the exercises in that. There are a lot of exercises. It will keep you busy for at least a year. And if at the end of that year you haven’t evolved, write me a letter of complaint, and I’ll try to write a better book.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

134. “From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, “Have you ever seen me before?” “No,” was the prompt answer. “Then,” cried Nasrudin, “how do you know it is me?”

— Robert Anton Wilson

135. “If you don’t laugh at all, you’ve missed the point. If you only laugh, you’ve missed your chance from illumination.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

136. “There is one universal sex law: Sex shall not be unregulated.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

137. “Hysteria is a chaotic and irrational emotional state caused by seeing how the world really operates.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

138. “Bio-survival anxiety will only permanently disappear when world-wide wealth has reached a level, and a distribution, where, without totalitarianism, everyone has enough tickets.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

139. “If I still remember that all realities are neurological constructs and relative to the observer, I am nonetheless committed now to one reality above all alternatives: the reality of Jesus and Buddha, in which reverence for life is the supreme imperative.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

140. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

141. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

142. “The land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody “owns” the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

143. “The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

144. “Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

145. “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.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

146. “Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

147. “Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They’re the ones who look like hippies.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

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

— Robert Anton Wilson

150. “I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread.”

— Robert Anton Wilson