Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Many people will automatically develop a sort of selective morality. They will have one set of ethics—the one they were taught as children and been used to all their lives—for judging their selves and their friends. They will have another, and a much lower one, for the President of the United States.

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

As the plot of 'Condor' unfolds, you'll understand that nothing is sacred in the pharmacy world or in the behind-the-scenes workings of the CIA and FBI.

All standards are double standards.

I'm a former CIA officer and Pentagon official. I'm a deep believer in border security, but we have to be a nation of moral - of morals and, like, a moral core.

President Trump's critics call him an immoral lout. By strict moral standards, so are we all.

At times, it appears easy to sermonise on morality and ethics. But morality and ethics appear good only when applied to others, never on oneself.

If you just want money and tax cuts and stuff, fine - just stop acting like you're moral.

Most people aren't good or bad. They're naive.

In the area of social righteousness we cannot be right on the inside and not do it. We cannot! Of course we have people who pretend that they can, but it simply isn't true.

Observe this, that tho a woman swear, forswear, lie, dissemble, back-bite, be proud, vain, malicious, anything, if she secures the main chance, she's still virtuous; that's a maxim.

I've always thought respectable people scoundrels, and I look anxiously at my face every morning for signs of my becoming a scoundrel.

For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.

There is a great deal of hard lying in the world; especially among people whose characters are above suspicion.

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. They need the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences. And little problems. After all, we are almost all human. Almost all of the time.

What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.

The moral person contemplates evil, the evil person commits it. And a person without a sense of humor can't distinguish between the two.... I know a lot of people who live in Marin County and contemplate spirituality and never get out of the hot tub.

Moralizing and morals are two entirely different things and are always found in entirely different people

Last night when I was commenting on the FBI and the CIA, the sound went off for 27 minutes. I should have known better.

At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people.