Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly.

I mean the future has become old fashioned.

I believe in rituals.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

The Sparks: Refutation of Heretics and Innovators

Our Lord Christ has surnamed Himself Truth, not Custom.

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.

I don't know what the next frontier is, but good comedy should put its toe into taboo waters. You have to transgress a little bit, and that area shifts with culture and with the year.

L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.

Traditions are lovely thingsto create traditions, that is, not to live off them.

I have neither permitted, nor shall I permit, the things which have been settled by the holy fathers to be violated by any innovation.

This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.

Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.

The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future.

Be assured, there is nothing new in theology except that which is false.

I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.

The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.