Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.

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.

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.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

belief is the death of intelligence.

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.

an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

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.

In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.

We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.

reality is always plural and mutable.

Is," "is," "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities.

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

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy.