Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Tibetan Space-Time-Warp Star-Nova Trips

The essence of authority, as he saw, was Law—that is, fiat—that is, effective communication running one way only. The essence of a libertarian system, as he also saw, was Contract—that is, mutual agreement—that is, effective communication running both ways. (Redundance of control is the technical cybernetic phrase.)

Milton said once, poetically, that whoever murders a book, murders a man. Psychologists would mostly agree that that is symbolically true. Destroying a book, like the psychotic behavior of slashing a photograph, expresses rage at the person who wrote the book or the person in the photo. One cannot help wondering, at this point, about those who burned the books of Dr. Reich or conspired to suppress the books of Dr. Velikovsky.

In Spain, Torquemada personally sent 10,220 persons to the stake. . . . Counting those killed for other heresies, the persecutions were responsible for reducing the population of Spain from twenty million to six million in two hundred years … While the well-known estimate of the total death-toll, from Roman times onward, of nine million is probably somewhat too high, it can safely be said that more persons were put to death than were killed in all the European wars fought up to 1914.

Everybody who has examined the UMMO documents without accepting them as extraterrestrial seems to think some committee devised them. Curiously, when the first Elmyr fakes came to light, most art Experts assumed a committee had done them . . .)

In general, people judge it manly to pronounce dogmatic verdicts and fight for them, and to admit quantum uncertainty (von Neumann's maybe) seems unmanly. Feminism often challenges this machismo, but, just as often, certain Feminists appear to think they will appear stronger if they speak and behave as dogmatically and unscientifically as the stupidest, most macho males.

The conflict, Marat/Sade (which should really be Marx/Sade, except that the ingenious Mr. Weiss was not quite ingenious enough to devise a historical conjunction between uncle Karl and the Marquis), is the conflict between anarchy and tyranny. Sade, not Marat or Marx, is the true revolutionary, for he aims at a world outside the crucible of punishment-and-submission, while they aim at a new world still within that crucible.

What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows what the subject feels better than the subject knows – i.e., that the subject doesn't feel what he feels but feels something else. This is the kind of verbal metaphysics that made the medieval theologians become the laughing-stocks of Voltaire and other rationalist critics.

The conventional explanation of such seemingly aphrodisiac effects is autosuggestion. That is, the people in question knew what the drugs were supposed to do to them and, therefore, unconsciously programmed themselves for such effects.

The major operative principle seems to be that the human computer operates in such a way as to make signals out of noise and thus to create information out of random energies where there was no signal . . . The information "created" from the noise can be shown by careful analysis to have been in the storage system of the computer . . .

Don't fool around with the masks of reality until you can handle the reality of masks.

Everybody understands that you cannot drink the word water, and yet virtually nobody seems entirely free of semantic delusions entirely comparable to trying to drink the ink-stains that form the word water on this page or the sound waves produced when I say water aloud. If you say, The word is not the thing, everybody agrees placidly; if you watch people, you see that they continue to behave as if something called Sacred really is Sacred and something called Junk really is Junk.

I dreamed I called Batman on the phone and asked, any truth in those rumors about you and Robin? Our relationship is 100% platonic, he replied stiffly. We sublimate. Why do you think we're always out looking for 'bad guys' that we can punish? And the line went dead with a quick click like handcuffs closing on a thin wrist forever.

Magic is not a necromanteia – a raising of dead material substances endowed with an imagined life – but a psychological branch of science, dealing with the sympathetic effects of stones, drugs, herbs, and living substances upon the imaginative and reflective faculties – and leading to ever new glimpses of the world of wonders around us, ranking it in due order of phenomena, and illustrating the beneficence of The Great Architect of the Universe.

After all, even those who create Disinformation Systems have themselves swallowed Disinformation Systems devised by their rivals. As Henry Kissinger once said, Anybody in Washington who isn't paranoid must be crazy.

If you think about it from the perspective of E-Prime, the world consists mostly of UFOs and UNFOs. Very few things (space-time events) in the air or on the ground give us the opportunity to identify them with certainty.

In dealing with cryptozoology, lepufology, Disinformation Systems and Quantum Mechanics one eventually feels that one has come close to total nonsense, a basic defect in the human mind (or the Universe?) or some mental fugue similar to schizophrenia or solipsism. However, as our opening drawing showed and we will see again and again, the ordinary perceptions of ordinary people contain just as much weirdness and mystery as all these Occult Sciences put together.

Evidently, if Lise had expected to meet Jesus and his 12 apostles and copulate with all of them in turn, that is what she would have remembered afterward.

This is precisely the sort of thing that occurs on an LSD trip. The difference is that the noise and newly created information is coming in at the tripper, not just through words on a page, but through each of the senses, including the 17 senses that modern science has discovered in addition to the traditional sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

Words do not equal in space-time the things or events they denote, yet people react to a choice between words as if making a choice between real things or events in the existential world.

Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.

I dreamed I called Adolf Hitler on the phone and asked him. What was your gimmick? They believed it was wiser to obey anyone, even me, than to risk anarchy, he said with a ghoulish laugh. And the line went dead with a sharp click like boot-heels snapped together.

It begins to seem that no one reality-tunnel is adequate for the description of all human experience, although some reality-tunnels are better for some purposes than others are.

This no longer surprised me. I had seen other such cases since Jane had toiled her way upward through hashish and peyote in desperate search of feelings. I even had a rule-of-thumb about it: Frigid women and Marxist men were the ones who required the heaviest doses to turn on. I assumed that this had some connection with the chronic muscular tensions holding back emotions that the Reichian and Gestalt psychologists discuss.