Robert Anton Wilson QUOTES

181 " In this holy war, I write as a war correspondent, awash in a deluge of propaganda from both sides. I have tried to gather the most accurate information available on the actual effects of various drugs on sexual drive and sexual performance. Since we are concerned here with a theological and legal conflict as well as a scientific field for investigation, there is little consensus. Trying to find out what a drug really does to the human mind and body, in America today, is like trying to find out who shot first at Waco or Ruby Ridge. “Only God knows for sure, and He isn’t telling.” All that the objective reporter can do, then, is to print the claims of both sides and let the reader decide for himself who can be trusted. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick

182 " However, the position of my books, and of post-modernism in general, which regards all representations, or maps, or models, as probabilistic and relative to their social context, Gross and Levitt dismissively call “perspectivism” (a good word in my estimation, so I cheerfully accept it). Gross and Levitt see perspectivism as an insidious threat to their One True Faith and a pathway downward to the bottomless abyss of nihilism. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death

183 " Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising

184 " In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising

185 " According to existential-humanist psychology, where the materialist says "I perceive," it would be more correct to say "I am making a bet.” Concretely, in Ames's cock-eyed room, we "make a bet" that we are seeing something familiar to us. If allowed into the room and asked to touch a corner of the ceiling with a pointer, we quickly discover the gamble in every act of perception. Typically, we hit almost everything but the corner in our first attempts — the walls, other parts of the ceiling, etc. A strange thing happens as we go on trying. Our perceptions change — we are making a new series of bets, one after another — and gradually we are able to find the corner we are aiming for. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

186 " It needs to be stated again and again that all opiates without exception are fundamentally depressants, so that the normal pattern, as dosage is increased, is from torpor to sleep to coma (ending in death, if there is an overdose). "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick

187 " The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution because through the third, semantic circuit and its symbols (words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information (negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising

188 " National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect “security.” In that gap between the ideal of “One Nation under surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all,” and the strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and among the police. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising

189 " It should be clear that in Finnegans Wake, past, present, future, space, time and Ego-reality are all dissolved into the multiple "realities" described by mystics and quantum physicists; that Joyce, a man of timid courage, has seized the keys of hell of death, by showing that the Ego dies and is reborn more continually than we realize, and that absence or death are as unreal in this context as the famous Schrödinger equations which demonstrated in quantum theory that a cat may be dead and alive at the same time. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Coincidance: A Head Test

190 " INFORMATION: as used in mathematical information theory, this denotes the amount of unpredictability in a message; information is, roughly, what you do not expect to hear. In this sense, information may be "true" or "false," but is always a small surprise. Resistance to new information measures the degree of Fundamentalism in a culture, a sub-culture, or an individual. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

191 " Where does this wealth come from? According to orthodox economists it comes from land, labor, and capital. According to Marxists, it comes from land and labor alone, and the capitalist is a thief who has inserted an artificial bookkeeping system into the process. Both are wrong. Land and labor alone, and land, labor and capital together, can’t produce new wealth if they are all organized by a fallacious idea, such as searching for oil where oil is not. The real source of wealth is correct ideas: workable ideas: that is, negative entropy — Information. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising

192 " Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising

193 " It is a well-known idea, not just among "mystics," but among modern psychologists, that the sad person lives in a sad world, the angry person in an angry world, etc. Then the sad person reads sad books and the angry person reads angry books? Even if those books seem funny and optimistic, say, to other readers? "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Coincidance: A Head Test

194 " As Philip K. Dick wrote in VALIS: Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistus, said "That which is above is that which is below." By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term. ~•~ VALIS is Dick’s equivalent of Joyce’s or the Chinese no-mind; it means vast Active Living Information system. ~•~ Joyce's equivalent is: The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes . . . solarsystemised, seriolocosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe under one, there is rhymeless reason to believe, original sun. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Coincidance: A Head Test

195 " By the same token, it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps people really do need religious experiences, whatever such experiences consist of. It is well-established, in LaBarre’s Ghost Dance, that a large number of people think they need such experience, and actively seek after it, whenever society faces a crisis that it cannot rationally understand. An earthquake alone will not necessarily trigger such a response, because an earthquake can be explained, more or less, within some traditional framework of ideas. But when the gods are mocked by missionaries of false and foreign gods, and take no revenge; when the sacred taboos are violated on all sides, and the gods still do not respond; when military defeats and other disasters occur in this perplexing context; when a man’s children are sold into slavery or his wife forcibly enwhored by the conquerors – then, some extraordinary explanation is needed, and it is at this point in time that the vision quest begins. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Sex, Drugs & Magick

196 " NEUROSEMANTICS: the study of how symbolism influences the human nervous system; how the local reality-tunnel programs our thoughts, feelings and apparent sense impressions. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

197 " And that reminded me--as everything in the universe does--of Finnegans Wake. Now, I'm sure in an educated audience like this, you're all thoroughly familiar with Finnegans Wake, and I don't have to explain its deep structure or its polylinguistic meanings. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Beyond Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories, Vol. II

198 " The Citadel has a vigorous and versatile propaganda department in the United States called the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal or CSICOP for short. You will not be surprised to learn that Martin Gardner and Prof. Bunge are among its spokesmen. CSICOPs method of "scientific investigation" generally is to wage a campaign of vilification, in the media, against any researcher whose ideas they don't like. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

199 " This is why John Ruskin, a century ago, tried to introduce a distinction between wealth and illth. This distinction did not become accepted and incorporated into our language because people, at that time, were not ready for it. Wealth, in Ruskin’s sense, consists of all those artifacts (concretized ideas) which enhance human life, or life generally. Illth consists of those artifacts which destroy, demean or degrade life. A factory that pollutes the air or water is illth in this sense; so is a bomb, a sword, a pistol, a tank of nerve-gas. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising

200 " In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game — even as victim, or citizen being monitored — will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia. "

― Robert Anton Wilson , Prometheus Rising