Talk:Robert Anton Wilson

I removed the quote of "Nothing is true, everything is permissible." This is not a RAW quote, it's RAW quoting Hassan I Sabbah.

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Robert Anton Wilson. --Antiquary 18:11, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

• An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.

• Belief in external "obscenity" is the modern form of the witchcraft delusion.

• Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

• Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

• Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

• Every model we make tells us how our mind works as much as it tells us about the universe. These are just human symbolic games: the universe itself is bigger than any of our models; ergo, any model we make doesn't describe the universe, it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time.

• Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.

• Excrement, incestuous person. I require my copulating currency, incestuous person.
  • Spike Lee, as translated into "Clean".

• Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

• I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

• I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination.

• I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.

• I think the joy of art is trying to convey what you perceive so that other people will perceive it more or less the same way. Art is a form of seduction. I mean, there are rapists in the intellectual world: they become politicians; the seducers become artists: we try to seduce people into our reality tunnel instead of leading them there with a gun, but we are trying to get them into our reality — our reality tunnel or our reality labyrinth or whichever it is: in my case it's a reality labyrinth.

• If lawyers had been present on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments would have twelve hundred amendments, all summing to the conclusion: The rich may ignore the rules, the poor will be hanged if they violate the smallest subordinate clause.

• If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

This one is cited as the content of "a card on RAW's desk" in various places like Magia sexualis: sex, magic, and liberation in modern Western esotericism By Hugh B. Urban Fcp 08:24, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

• Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

• Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.

• Much of what the world calls sanity is really a hypnosis or dream, much of what is called lunacy is a terrible perceptiveness.

• Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church.

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

• Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm mad but not ill.

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

• Parsifal, the pure fool: He is pure because he has never learned the guilt and shame that the false gnosis of the churches has imposed on the rest of us. The symbolism of his lance redeeming the wasteland is rather overt.

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

• Pregnancy is a kind of miracle. Especially so in that it proves that a man and woman can conspire to force God to create a new soul.

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

• The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.

• The average is that which no person quite ever is.

• The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

• The function of Law? The recitation of the unintelligible by the unscrupulous to empty the purses of the unwary. The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

• The Grail is the womb of the beloved.

• The greatest prejudice that exists in the modern world, the only one almost universally accepted, is the prejudice against children.
  • Also attributed to Reverend Loveshade

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

• The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.

• There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.

• There is no complete theory of anything.

• There is one universal sex law: Sex shall not be unregulated.

• We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

• When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.

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

• You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me... It's called senility...

• You never get "outside." What you call "outside" is another part of "inside."

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

"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."

The source given for this quotation is The Illuminatus! Trilogy but I can't find it @ http://books.google.com/books?id=I9_GljsDPZoC

The citation seems a bit off — I did find it in The Illuminati Papers (1997), p. 111. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 04:44, 29 August 2010 (UTC)