Dr. Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) was a prominent futurist, libertarian and author with a Ph.D in Psychology.
He once wrote for Playboy magazine. Among his notable works are the “Schrödinger’s Cat” trilogy and the “Illuminatus!” trilogy, co-authored with Robert Shea, blending fact and fiction while humorously addressing American conspiracy fears.
In “The Cosmic Trigger”, Wilson discussed Discordianism, Sufism and the Illuminati. Collaborating with Timothy Leary, he advocated for space migration, life prolongation and cognitive enhancement.
His other writings include “The Earth Will Shake”, “Reality Is What You Can Get Away With”, “Quantum Psychology” and “Everything Is Under Control”, a conspiracy encyclopedia co-written with Miriam Joan Hill.
I have listed the top quotes from Robert Anton Wilson.
Best Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
Communication is only possible between equals. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Human beings live in their myths. They only endure their realities. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
No wife, no horse, no mustache. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The variables vary too much and the constants aren’t as constant as they seem. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We’re trapped in linguistic constructs… all that is is metaphor. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
When dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
If it’s true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for? ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The secret to my success has been optimism tempered by anger. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We’re living on the Planet of the Apes. Is that funny or serious? ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
You can prove anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jailbreak. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Top Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Belief is the death of intelligence. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
People who’ve been through our educational system, they think they’re thinking, when they’re just repeating like parrots. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Wise Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
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. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Show me a movement that doesn’t hate somebody and I will join it at once. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
My own opinion is that 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. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Only the madman is absolutely sure. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
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. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Hippies generally aren’t busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The abandoned infant’s cry is rage, not fear. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
It’s not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don’t understand it until it makes you weep. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Popular Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
The Right’s view of government and the Left’s view of big business are both correct. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The rapists of the intellectual world become politicians; the seducers become artists. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don’t take crap from anybody. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Creativity has a touch of the bizarre. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Anyone in the United States today who isn’t paranoid must be crazy. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers.
The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can’t believe. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
A true initiation never ends. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
If one can only see things according to one’s own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Famous Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
I regard belief as a form of brain damage. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
What the thinker thinks, the prover proves. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Entropy requires no maintenance. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
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. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
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. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you’ll see that they’re all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The fear of death is the beginning of slavery. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Intellectual Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes, what our brains are capable of saying at this time. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We live in our fantasies and endure our realities. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
People’s belief in their own local reality-tunnels keep us all far stupider than we ought to be… ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
An optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The final war will be between Pavlov’s dog and Schoedinger’s Cat. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
A Discordian is someone who sees windmills and thinks they might be giants. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We all see only that which we are trained to see. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there’d be no more wars. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Of course I’m crazy, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Perhaps the final secret of the Illuminati is that you don’t know you’re a member until it’s too late to get out. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Short Robert Anton Wilson Quotes
There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
We can’t run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
Blue uniforms are real. Cops are a social fiction. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there’s no rational life here. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
If you want to be happy, practice it every day. ~ Robert Anton Wilson.
So these were the 85 top Robert Anton Wilson quotes on mysticism and life.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Jonas Salk quotes and David Grohl quotes.
