Robert Anton Wilson

January 18, 1932 6a Brooklyn, New York – January 11, 2007 450a
Santa Cruz, California
Path: discordianism his wikipedia

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

Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.

Belief is the death of intelligence.

Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority.

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

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.).

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.

If the oncoming mutation to interstellar immortality is screwed up by the politicians, it will be because those of us who see the opportunities in modern science are not adroit enough to outmaneuver the forces of inertia, stupidity and greed. Well, if we're not intelligent enough to overcome such obstacles, then we don't deserve to carry off the mutation at this stage of evolution.

I'm the kind of anarchist whose chief objection to the State is that it kills so many people. Government is the epitome of the deathist philosophy I reject.

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat

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

Only the madman is absolutely sure.

Robert A. Heinlein has been an idol to me for more than 20 years. He can do no wrong, no matter how much he loves wars and hates pacifists.

The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.

The land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody "owns" the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves.

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots.

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.

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

The things that hinder me are opportunities to learn more and develop further.

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

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.

There is no complete theory of anything.

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.

Voting wouldn't excite me unless it included electing the directors of the big banks and corporations, who make the real decisions that affect our lives. It's hard to get excited about the trained seals in Washington.

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

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

You can "prove" anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning.