Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

Some social scientists say that in-group/out-group biases are hard-wired into the human brain. Even without overt prejudice, it is cognitively convenient for people to sort items into categories and respond based on what is usually associated with those categories: a form of statistical discrimination, playing the odds.

The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them.

You know, anytime you take one group and you blame them for a problem, there is an issue.

I just don't believe in generalisations.

Prejudices are not easily got rid of as an old coat which is no longer thought of.

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

The world believes all blondes are stupid and brunettes are smarter. Well, I disagree.

Stereotypes happen. I try not to embrace them or avoid them.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.

Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

Prejudices in disfavor of a person fix deeper, and are much more difficult to be removed, than prejudices in favor.

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation, or a distinct group by its least worthy members.

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own

When you have demonization of a group of people, it's easy to clump them all together and not understand them.

When we blame all Muslims, all Syrians, or all members of any other group because of the actions of individuals, we fall into the trap of asserting collective guilt. We empower the narrow-minded ideology that we are trying to defeat.

We're all biased, right, in many different ways - politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us - and that's fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems.

Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate.

If you're good at what you do, it's going to quiet the people that think you're not good because of how you look or what sex you are.

I remember once at the end of a BBC job interview the manager said to me: 'I didn't realise people like you were clever.' I don't think he was being intentionally nasty. At that time in the BBC he was surrounded by clones of himself, give or take some facial hair and glasses.

Making sweeping over-generalizations is classically un-American.