Robert Anton Wilson
Writer
1932-01-18
Quotes by Robert Anton Wilson
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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.
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How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?
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Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons
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Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.
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Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
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But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.''What sort of tools?''More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason— or are manipulated into reasoning— that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.
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Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars.
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Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, My current model -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised. In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
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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.
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It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
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belief is the death of intelligence.
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...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
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...reality is always plural and mutable.
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...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
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Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars.
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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.
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