"...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable."
Read quote
11 likes
Quote collection
Robert Anton Wilson quotes (page 7 of 11)
219 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
Read quote
11 likes
"My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything."
Read quote
10 likes
"The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now."
Read quote
10 likes
"The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct."
Read quote
10 likes
"Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities."
Read quote
10 likes
"Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame."
Read quote
10 likes
"I'd support life extension by whatever means, from cryonic suspension to cyborgism to coding ourselves into our computers or whatever. There is nothing noble or beautiful or dignified about dying. Like poverty, it is ugly, nasty, brutal and primitive."
Read quote
10 likes
"If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?"
Read quote
9 likes
"Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information - that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/ conditioned reality-tunnel"
Read quote
9 likes
"You know what family values means, that's hating the same people your grandfather hated."
Read quote
9 likes
"I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives."
Read quote
9 likes
"Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times."
Read quote
9 likes
"To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense."
Read quote
9 likes
"If you don't laugh at all, you've missed the point. If you only laugh, you've missed your chance from illumination."
Read quote
9 likes
"Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves."
Read quote
9 likes
"There's a seeker born every minute."
Read quote
9 likes
"Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper."
Read quote
9 likes