Timothy Leary Quotes

A country run by law is a country ruined by lawyers. It is neurologically impossible for a lawyer or a military man to think creatively or to act in harmony with nature.

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

Tune in, turn on, and drop out.

Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital?

The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.

The word "religion" beautifully defines itself, of course. It translates "to bind" from the Latin
"re" means back and "ligare" means to tie up. All religions are straightjackets, jackets for the straight.

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.

Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.

The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are
little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be
delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance.
Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light

Acid is not for every brain ... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.

Express the psychedelic with the cybernetic. Turn on, tune in and boot up.

LSD is known to induce psychosis, in people who have never used it.

Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D.

You are a powerful, unlimited and eternal soul who is here to enjoy the experience of creativity and contribute to humanity's evolution.

People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.

question authority

My favorite three words in the English language are: 'I don't know', because every time I say them, I learn something new.

You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.
Essentially, there's a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.

The PC is the LSD of the '90s.

Science is all metaphor.

Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love.

Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.

That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden.

I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.

To use your head, you have to go out of your mind.

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

I was ovulated, fertilized, and born in the 20th century. I can't wipe out my whole personal background, or the fact that almost everyone I talk to today is brain-damaged by our education. I think American education makes us hopeless symbol addicts. It's designed to produce docile automatons. But it's going to take years before you can urge young people to drop out of school without appearing to be an eccentric or a mad-man.

There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.

A man without justice is a beast, and a man who would make himself a beast forgets the pain of being a man.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration.

In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.

At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.

One cannot evolve from one's robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized.

Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing.

God #1 is the Single-cell Intelligence, the collaborative brain that knows how to run a simple protozoan. The First God is the one-celled God. The First and original craft of God is Protozoan.

They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet.

Prayer is ecstatic communication with your innernavigational computer.

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind

One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.

And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual's function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you're in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.

To the elitist hedonist, life is the avoidance of boredom and routine.

Living, dying, and thinking ... they're all team sports.

Critics have told me I've ruined the lives of 50 million young people. I can't be certain of this, since only about 10 million have ever come back to thank me.

Inner reality is certainly more important than the outer reality.

I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.

Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

I'd just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven't heard a new idea in eight years. Let's get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That's the philosopher's job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.

Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them.

Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.

Human beings have a right to change their consciousness, and it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.

Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, narrowing, dangerous form of behavior.

The romantic poetry and fiction of the last 200 years has quite blinded us to the fact that emotions are an active and harmful form of stupor.

Any peasant can tell you that. Beware of emotions. Any child can tell you that. Watch out for the emotional person. He is a lurching lunatic.

Emotions are caused by biochemical secretions in the body to serve during the state of acute emergency. An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac. Emotions are addictive and narcotic and stupefacient.

Do not trust anyone who comes on emotional.

What are the emotions? In a book entitled Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, written when I was a psychologist, I presented classifications of emotions and detailed descriptions of their moderate and extreme manifestations. Emotions are all based on fear. [...]

The emotional person cannot think; he cannot perform any effective game action (except in acts of physical aggression and strength). The emotional person is turned off sensually. His body is a churning robot. [...]

The only state in which we can learn, harmonize, grow, merge, join, understand is the absence of emotion. This is called bliss or ecstasy, attained through centering the emotions. [...]

Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other

There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.

Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.

If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.

The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly

as a guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain,

In the Eleusinian mysteries, they would always warn people, "if you go in here, your ego will die. You're going to have to confront all your past hang-ups, strip them off, and be a changed person." One emperor of Rom who wanted to be initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries said, "That's interesting, I approve of what you're doing, but I don't want to be changed.

Today, reality is created mainly by television and movies. The media producers have become a priest-caste who guide, direct, and manage reality.

"I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more . . . "

"Don't follow leaders! Watch your parking meters!"

When Bob Dylan sang these lines in the 1960s, he was performing philosophy, transmitting powerful new ideas for which his mass audience was ready. Dylan thus triggered off heretical, sinful acts of resistance to authority, rejection of militarism, refusal to join the mechanical factory culture.

Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.

Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.

Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.

I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.

People ask me how many times I've taken LSD--and I don't count. But it's the same thing when they ask me how many times I've made love. The answer is, not enough.

I despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.

After you turn on, don't spend the rest of your life contemplating the inner wonders. Begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty.

The most important thing you do in your life is to die.

LSD, wisely used by professionals, could reprogram enough nervous systems to accelerate consciousness and intelligence before we laid ourselves and our planet waste."To use your head you have to go out of your mind" "You are a God, act like one"

Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.

The general direction of evolution is to produce a serially imprinting, multibrained creature able to decipher its own program, create the technology to leave the planet and live in post-terrestrial mini-worlds, decode the aging sectors of the DNA code
thus assuring immortality, and act in harmony with stages of evolution to come.

a man--venerable, with a white beard, or on a cross, or as a baby, or a sage seated in the full lotus position. Are these not limiting incarnations, temporary housings, of the great energy process?

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.

The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems able to escape from the doomed planet and contact manifestations of the same amino-acid seeding that have evolved in other solar systems. The mission is the message
to escape and come home.

Think for yourself. Question authority.

Information is Power. Think For Yourself. CAUTION: proper use of the brain is not endorsed by federal governments nor huge corporations involved in serious financial profit from a brainwashed and enslaved population. Mild discomfort may occur as confusing independent thought challenges popular views of the world.

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.

Romantic poetry and fiction of the last 2000 years has blinded us to the fact that emotions are a low form of jungle consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, dangerous form of fanatic stupor.

Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth.

We live our lives from A-Z, but forget the other 24 letters in between.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.

My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form.

Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.