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...”

“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 h...”

“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 Civilizatio...”

“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 fo...”

“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 ki...”

“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 t...”