Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

If you wish to persuade people that because Adam ate an apple, all who have never heard of this interesting occurrence will be roasted in an everlasting fire by a benevolent Deity, you must catch them young, make them stupid by means of drink or drugs, and carefully isolate them from all contact with books or companions capable of making them think.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

Since I was 9, I'd been told what to say, what to think.

By education most have been misled; So they believe, because they were bred. The priest continues where the nurse began, And thus the child imposes on the man.

I see the 'z' in 'Humanz' as referring to robots, AI, programming, brainwashing, indoctrination. And it's a question to us: are we human, or are we humanz? Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves? Do we just believe what we're told? That's how I see it.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

A mind virus is different in that there is no form to it; these are ideas placed in our heads when we are little. We get programmed by well-meaning people like our parents and their parents, our culture, religions and schools. We get conditioned to believe in our limitations and what's not possible.

What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life.

It's mind control, see. You have to go to school, get those exams, get to university or college, get a job, get married, don't miss the boat, do it now or you'll shoot your life down the drain. Yeah. They got you as soon as you were born. They never risked a second of your life. When you have kids they'll be telling them they have to wear a plastic mask and put a penny in the slot about their nose before they can breathe in.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

Get them while they're young and bend their minds.

We limit ourselves. We're told to act and behave in certain way from birth.

Because we're brought into the world or educated in a certain way, we're trained to accept the world in a certain way.

I think we are all programmed to please as we grow up.

Because of the dynamics on the picket line all my life, I had these expectations of people. It was all the things that I had learned about outsiders from the time I was tiny, that they were evil, that if they were being nice to me they were trying to seduce me away from the truth.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.

I think that man is conditioned to violence.

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.

It's not enough to bash in heads. You've got to bash in minds.