Quotes by "Robert Anton Wilson"

belief is the death of intelligence.

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

...reality is always plural and mutable.

...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

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.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town. Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men? I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer. I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis. To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.

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.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

I'm sorry There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool.

The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.

My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.

I'm not an anarchist any longer, because I've concluded that anarchism is an impractical ideal.

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

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.