Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves.

I grew up bar-singing and saw all kinds of ways people tried to outrun their emotional pain. It doesn't work. You end up with the original pain, as well as new pain added on top of it from the tactics you used trying to avoid it in the first place. It's best to take a deep breath, bolster yourself, and walk through it.

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.

When I repress my emotion my stomach keeps score.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

I had preconceived notions going in and it was even stranger than I thought it would be …. It is a total cult of personality.

Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.

I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

There's something about being cerebral, intellectual, and yet emotionally repressed [in being villain]. If you think someone's doing this [bad] stuff and they're in complete control, that's more scary than if they're out of control.

Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the crudest words.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time.

The most dangerous people are always clever, compelling, and charismatic.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.

I don't like the kind of writer who's out to change the world and beat up on people for their own good. Stalin did that and Hitler did that, and to hell with them.

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don't think the two mix.

If there be any one habit which more than another is the dry rot of all that is high and generous in youth, it is the habit of ridicule.

The organism is thus being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered. Inasmuch as the greater liberty involves a contraction rather than extension and development of instinctual needs, it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression - one might speak of "institutionalized desublimation". The latter appears to be a vital factor in the making of the authoritarian personality of our time.

... motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.

The domination of one's spirit and mind is not a pretty thing, but I think it happens.

There are certain reactions that you aren't allowed to show in Berlin, for example that you feel offended. If you do, the best-case scenario is a sympathetic article along the lines of: Nice guy, but he's not up to it. The alternative is to don a suit of armor and become cynical. But that's not healthy either: Cynicism is the worst characteristic a politician can have. That's why you have to have an internal balance in Berlin, so you can stay true to yourself. And I have that.