My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Interpretation
Embracing unique perspectives doesn't negate validity.
This quote emphasizes that having unconventional thoughts or being perceived as 'crazy' does not automatically invalidate one's ideas or beliefs. It encourages individuals to recognize that differing viewpoints can hold truth, regardless of societal perceptions of sanity.
In practice
In a debate about mental health awareness, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of acknowledging diverse viewpoints.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.
The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).
There is no point in apportioning blame. What is done, is done.
I have never regretted my silence. As for my speech, I have regretted it over and over again.
Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.
Problems can only be solved by the people who have them. You have to try and coax them and love them into seeing ways in which they can help themselves.
If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.
But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder--oh, what will you think of me--if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.