Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

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.

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.

If the word ''fuck'' is ''obscene'' or ''dirty'', why isn't the word ''duck'' 75% ''dirty''?

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.

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.

Show me a movement that doesn't hate somebody, and I will join it at once.

All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: 'Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.

Here's what it is, here's what it isn't, now here's why you need to go tell everyone how smart I am.

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.

the distinction between magick and communication exits only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions.

Here's to the good nuns for telling me what books NOT to read!

Believe it possible that you can float off the ground and fly by merely willing it. See what happens.

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.

he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

Since the Unistat primates, like other domesticated hominids, did not know they were primates, all this was explained by a ferocious amount of ink excretions invoking Morality and Ideology, the twin gods of domesticated primatedom.

That night he wrote in his diary, Challenge a remaining taboo. It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo Thou shalt not question Aristotle. Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo.

You are a prize, Marlene said. You really are a prize. Have you spent your whole life learning how to please women? It's my life study, Starhawk said. Everything else is just a hobby.

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.

Life is one, but consciousness is divided. It is the stress of the divided consciousness that every visionary is seeking to deal with.

Men (and women) indeed become strange when seeking gods. As the present work will show, however, they become even stranger when seeking devils.

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such asexpropriating the expropriators, an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty, they did it to me so I can do it to them, and, in general, the emotional mathematics of one plus one equals zero (1 + 1 = 0). The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc.

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.

If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, Who are you? would be to hum the Hammerklavier.

I've never been afraid of the American Nazi Party, on the grounds that anybody dumb enough to pick a name like that is not a serious threat. Any real fascist movement that's a threat, that's serious and really endangers us, would call itself the Red, White, and Blue Christian American Party, or something like that. They wouldn't be dumb enough to call themselves Nazis.