Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

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

Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship.

G.W.F. Hegel . He's perfect, Weishaupt wrote.... Unlike Kant , who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.

MR. KHARIS: 'Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?' MR. CELINE: 'I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?' JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: 'You become facetious, Mr. Celine.' MR. CELINE: 'I have never been more serious.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy.

Ipsum Nomen Res Ipsa: The Name Itself is the Thing Itself. I.N.R.I.: Isis, Apophis, Osiris: IAO.

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.

And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you're using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which 'real' reality can be seen; we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.

When the pope sits on the chamber pot to shit, does he believe in his own infallibility? Does not every imposter occasionally recognize his own hairy, homely humanity? Perhaps not; worn long enough, sometimes the Mask of Authority becomes the man. Even looking in a mirror, he will see the sacred Mask and not his own ordinary human face.

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

I can summarize my thoughts now by simply saying each must find his or her own Way because the way does not exist.

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

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

so many people have been hypnotized by Aristotelian ''yes/ no'' logic to the extent that any step beyond that Bronze Age mythos seems to them a whirling, dizzying plunge into a pit of Chaos and the Dark Night of Nihilism.

This special green is the result of high copper concentration in the soil.

If it were Hegel , I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

There is no complete theory of anything.

See you when tea is hot.

I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute.

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existencial/operacional probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to ivent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damn near all Religions on the planet, I think.