Thread by @jposhaughnessy

Some great thoughts from Robert Anton Wilson

"The fewer resentments you harbor, the happier your life will be. Why are we all such fools as to ignore this obvious lesson, which a truly rational person would have figured out by the age of 8 or 9, if not sooner?"

“I think cheerfulness is one of the most important and least appreciated virtues in the world. Anybody can bring the room down by sitting around bitching and griping, but it takes real creativity to bring the whole room up.”

“We can only be sane and responsible if we stop looking outside ourselves for strength (Big Daddy or God) or for somebody to blame (The Devil). God and Devil are real, but inside us.”

“As Josiah Warren remarked, "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." Almost always, we have not understood them. We have murdered them and mummified their corpses.”

More scientists can be found alive today than in all past history. 65 percent of all humans who ever survived past the age of 65 live in our world right now [i.e., 1989]. Read that sentence again.”

“To deny dogmatically is to say that something is impossible. But to assert this is to claim, tacitly, that you already know the full spectrum of the possible. In a century in which every decade has brought new and astonishing

scientific shocks, that is a huge, brave and audacious faith indeed. It requires an almost heroic self-confidence and an equally gigantic ignorance of recent intellectual history.”

“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive...[and]decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.”

"INFORMATION: as used in mathematical information theory , this denotes the amount of unpredictability in a message; information is, roughly, what you do not expect to hear."

“Very powerful forces have worked upon us, from birth through school to jobs, attempting to suppress our individuality, our creativity and, above all, our curiosity — in short, to destroy everything that encourages us to think for ourselves.”

“Humor is the only mental health technique I know that allows us to go on living in such a mad, mendacious, clandestine world.”

“Whenever you stop and reflect, “Maybe I just think or act that way because I’m a Cosmic Schmuck,” you become — for a moment — a bit less of a Cosmic Schmuck.”

"Opinions result from perceptions, and perceptions reinforce Opinions, which then further control perceptions, in a repeating loop that logic can never penetrate.”

“I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”