Robert Anton Wilson
We live in our myths, we only endure reality.Collection: Reality
Try living forever with the metaprogram, 'Everything works out more perfectly than I plan it.Collection: Work Out
Blue uniforms are real. Cops are a social fictionCollection: Real
Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers.Collection: Struggle
You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.Collection: Believe
In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, 'traditional family values' denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.)Collection: Children
There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.Collection: Reality
We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such.Collection: Reality
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).Collection: Emotional
I like pacifists and people who have a heavy emotional identification with deathism and war would probably call me a pacifist, but I am a non-invasivist rather than a non-violentist. That is, I believe that an invaded people have the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. This includes putting ground glass or poison in the invaders' food, shooting at them from ambush, sabotage, the general strike, armed revolution, etc. It's up to the invaded to decide which of these techniques they will use. It's not up to some moralist to tell them which techniques are permissible.Collection: War
I've recently noticed "as if for the first time" that when people pray they always look "upward" - i.e. perpendicular to whatever place they're standing - or kneeling or groveling. I deduce that they conceive of their "god" as topologically isomorphic to a huge donut, about a thousand miles wider than Earth.Collection: People
Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anybody.Collection: Enjoy
I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?Collection: Thinking
Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?Collection: Real
Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.Collection: Believe
There's a great universe just next door.Collection: Doors
You can "prove" anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning.Collection: Levels
All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.Collection: Reality
Belief Systems contradict both science and ordinary "common sense." B.S. contradicts science, because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: it can only say, "This model"- or theory, or interpretation of the data- "fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week.Collection: Faith
Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse.Collection: Editors
There's a seeker born every minute.Collection: Born
Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves.Collection: Sorry
Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye've been left to fight alone.Collection: Brother
The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.Collection: Way
Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate.Collection: Moving
People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians- meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive.Collection: Meaningful
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.Collection: Offering
Masturbation is not the happiest form of sexuality, but the most advisable for him who wants to be alone and think.Collection: Thinking
I read everything, including the labels on canned food. I'm a hopeless print addict, a condition alleviated only by daily meditation which breaks the linear-Aristotelian trance. National Lampoon, Scientific American are what I read most obsessively.Collection: Meditation
I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.Collection: Mother
The variables vary too much and the constants aren't as constant as they seem.Collection: Variables
I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me.Collection: Trying
Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.Collection: Attitude
Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there’s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wallCollection: Wall
You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.Collection: Reality
Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.Collection: Looks
Science, incidentally, not only ignores the question of indwelling 'essences' by looking instead at measurable relationships, but science also does not agree that knowledge is obtained through Rothbard's Medieval 'investigation by a reason,' i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed.Collection: Essence
Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology.Collection: Information
No wife, no horse, no mustacheCollection: Horse
Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size).Collection: Size
help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think moreCollection: Thinking
Christianity is alone in thinking that sex is entirely the Devil's business and an offence to God, This is a strange doctrine and almost implies that God and the devil must have collaborated on the creation of humanity, God working above the belly button and the Devil below.Collection: Sex
All Chaos was once yer kingdom; verily, held ye dominion over the entire Pentaverse, but today ye was sore afraid in dark coners, nooks, and sink holes.Collection: Fear
Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses - our reality-tunnels - will become.Collection: Reality
Here's to the good Nuns for telling me what books NOT to read!Collection: Book
It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called "barbarism" and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'.Collection: Rhetorical Strategies
O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?Collection: Fear
A Discordian is someone who sees windmills and thinks they might be giantsCollection: Thinking