Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
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Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.
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There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.
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There's a seeker born every minute.
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We live in our myths, we only endure reality.
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Robert A. Heinlein has been an idol to me for more than 20 years. He can do no wrong, no matter how much he loves wars and hates pacifists.
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Hysteria is a chaotic and irrational emotional state caused by seeing how the world really operates.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.
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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.
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Taking somebody's money without permission is stealing, unless you work for the IRS; then it's taxation. Killing people en masse is homicidal mania, unless you work for the Army; then it's National Defense. Spying on your neighbors is invasion of privacy, unless you work for the FBI; then it's National Security. Running a whorehouse makes you a pimp and poisoning people makes you a murderer, unless you work for the CIA; then it's counter-intelligence.
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You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.
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I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives.
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I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
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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.
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Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress ... the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.
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Stupidity is a blockage in the ability to receive, integrate and transmit new signals.
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Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody and I will join it at once.
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If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.
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Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.
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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.
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You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me... It's called senility.
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The variables vary too much and the constants aren't as constant as they seem.
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It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars.
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... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit.
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Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.
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Mind is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors).
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Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.
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...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
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