Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson

Born: 18 January 1932 American futurist, conspiricist, Libertarian, guerilla ontologist and satirical author

Sourced

• "I regard the two major male archetypes in 20th Century literature as Leopold Bloom and Hannibal Lecter, M.D. Bloom, the perpetual victim, the kind and gentle fellow who finishes last, represented an astonishing breakthrough to new levels of realism in the novel, and also symbolized the view of humanity that hardly anybody could deny c. 1900-1950. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim. Bloom, exploited and downtrodden by the Brits for being Irish and rejected by many of the Irish for being Jewish, does indeed epiphanize humanity in the first half of the 20th Century. And he remains a nice guy despite everything that happens...

    "Dr Lecter, my candidate for the male archetype of 1951-2000, will never win any Nice Guy awards, I fear, but he symbolizes our age as totally as Bloom symbolized his. Hannibal’s wit, erudition, insight into others, artistic sensitivity, scientific knowledge etc. make him almost a walking one man encyclopedia of Western civilization. As for his “hobbies” as he calls them -- well, according to the World Game Institute, since the end of World War II, in which 60,000,000 human beings were murdered by other human beings, 193, 000,000 more humans have been murdered by other humans in brush wars, revolutions, insurrections etc. What better symbol of our age than a serial killer? Hell, can you think of any recent U.S. President who doesn’t belong in the Serial Killer Hall of Fame? And their motives make no more sense, and no less sense, than Dr Lecter’s Darwinian one-man effort to rid the planet of those he finds outstandingly loutish and uncouth."

• "No, they were not exactly automatons, but they did not know what they were doing. They take down a boy’s britches. They stare at his buttocks. They cane him until the buttocks bleed. And they believe this is virtue, because it is done in a school, and it becomes vice only if it is done in a place with a red lantern over the door."
  • The Widow's Son

• "I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. 'Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance!' just doesn't cut it…."
  • DragonCon, 2000.

Attributed

• "The abandoned infant’s cry is rage, not fear."

• "Excrement, incestuous person. I require my copulating currency, incestuous person."
  • Spike Lee, as translated into Clean

• "Belief in external 'obscenity' is the modern form of the witchcraft delusion."

• "Of course I’m crazy, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I’m mad but not ill."

• "Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different."

• "There is one universal sex law: Sex shall not be unregulated."

• "Philadelphia merely seems dull because it’s next to exciting Camden, New Jersey."

• "The Right’s view of government and the Left’s view of big business are both correct."

• "We live in our fantasies and endure our realities."

• "Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper."
  • Source: Prometheus Rising

• "The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill."

• "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."