Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.

Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.

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.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

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.

And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.

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

People are so brainwashed by the rules that they don't know what really matters.

What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being.

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all.

Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.

It is in the nature of man to like what he is familiar with and in what he has been brought up, and that he fears anything alien. The plurality of religions and their mutual intolerance result from the fact that people remain faithful to the education they receive.

The spirit of the age, as it is revealed to each of us, is too often only the spirit of the group in which the accidents of birth or education or occupation or fellowship have given us a place.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television.

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been found that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery..

There's a reason why young people think what they think. They are taught it. In many cases when they learn at home is erased or countered or overcome.

There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.'

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

The lifestyle that I grew up in, it was passed on to me. I didn't know there was another world.

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

I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.