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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

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Robert Anton Wilson
Age: 74 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 18
Died: 2007
Died: January 11
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Psychologist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Flatbush
Long Island
Robert Edward Wilson
Time
Believing
Seeing
Actually
Fact
Facts
Better
Much
Believe
Occasionally

More quotes by Robert Anton Wilson

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I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.
Robert Anton Wilson
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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
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If you don't laugh at all, you've missed the point. If you only laugh, you've missed your chance from illumination.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Science, incidentally, not only ignores the question of indwelling 'essences' by looking instead at measurable relationships, but science also does not agree that knowledge is obtained through Rothbard's Medieval 'investigation by a reason,' i.e., by inventing definitions and then deducing what your definitions implicitly assumed.
Robert Anton Wilson
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I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread.
Robert Anton Wilson
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The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
Robert Anton Wilson
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It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called barbarism and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Anyone in the United States today who isn't paranoid must be crazy.
Robert Anton Wilson
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It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
Robert Anton Wilson
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An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Since things are moving faster and faster, we cannot afford the amount of stupidity that we used to be able to tolerate.
Robert Anton Wilson
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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.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves.
Robert Anton Wilson
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The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Blue uniforms are real. Cops are a social fiction
Robert Anton Wilson
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Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Creativity has a touch of the bizarre
Robert Anton Wilson
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All that we know is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.
Robert Anton Wilson
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Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.
Robert Anton Wilson