Leary Quotes

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

Temptation's something you have to deal with even if you're not famous. It's harder when you're famous because it's a lot more in your face, and that makes it a little more difficult to walk away from sometimes. ~ Denis Leary

Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's t-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning. ~ Rachel Cohn

I'm sick and tired of our generation being called the TV generation. What do you expect? We watched Lee Harvey Oswald get his brains blown out all over. How could we change the channel after that? ~ Denis Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

I think we're going to carry the 'Ice Age's up to 'Ice Age 15,' which means basically they'll be in the present decade. ~ Denis Leary

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

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. ~ Timothy Leary

I love to smoke. I smoke seven thousand packs a day! ~ Denis Leary

Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful. ~ Timothy Leary

Ann Romney talking about middle class moms is like Chris Christie talking about a salad ~ Denis Leary

I'm still pretty self-centered, greedy and angry. ~ Denis Leary

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

Julieanne Smolinksi has a history in rock journalism and she's a huge rock 'n' roll fan, and she was a huge fan of Ava (Elaine Hendrix) and Gigi (Elizabeth Gillies) and of the actresses. I was really lucky to get her, in between seasons on Grace and Frankie. ~ Denis Leary

There two types of people: thinkers and and those who are thought for. ~ J.A. Leary

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn't afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines. ~ Viv Albertine

Happy Easter everyone! Jesus dies, comes back from the dead - and we get chocolate eggs. It's like turn-down service from God. ~ Denis Leary

I'm liking that I can throw any kind of sentence at her without worrying it's too out there. ~ Rachel Cohn

Doing the same character over and over, it gets boring. ~ Denis Leary

The best pitch I ever heard about cocaine was back in the early eighties when a street dealer followed me down the sidewalk going: I got some great blow man. I got the stuff that killed Belushi. ~ Denis Leary

If you do good work, it tends to stick around. People still come up to me and say, 'The Ref' is my favorite Christmas movie.' ~ Denis Leary

question authority ~ Timothy Leary

My goal is to leave this planet with the biggest carbon footprint I can possibly leave. ~ Denis Leary

I think it's a shame when you come across young actors and musicians who haven't had the time to learn their craft. It doesn't matter if it's acting or music; you really have to learn how to do it from the bottom up because unless you have a great work ethic ... fame is a terrible thing to have. ~ Denis Leary

Sometimes 'great acting' is just showing off - chewing up scenery and dialogue and other actors - the equivalent of a theatrical sugar rush. ~ Denis Leary

There's not going to be a 'Rescue Me' movie. Not a chance. ~ Denis Leary

I would never do crack ... I would never do a drug named after a part of my own ass, okay? ~ Denis Leary

All men hear is blah, blah, blah, blah, SEX, blah, blah, blah, FOOD, blah, blah, blah, BEER. ~ Denis Leary

I like to give the actors freedom to take what we have on the page and improve on it. And they do that quite a bit. ~ Denis Leary

If I'm president, there are going to be government vans that drive around and pick up people who shouldn't be wearing certain clothing. Talk about lack of civil rights - I'm sorry, I'm pulling you right off the street, and we're giving you clothes that you're going to be O.K. in. ~ Denis Leary

One of those things that I like about TV is that if you get a group of people you like, you can work with these people for months at a time, and you can discover their strengths and weaknesses, and you can use those in the direction where you take the characters. ~ Denis Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

In addition to my cousin, there were 30 or 40 guys I grew up with who became firefighters as well. So, I've been around firefighters all my life. ~ Denis Leary

Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Mrs. O' Leary is my pet. I couldn't let you stick a sword in her rump, now, could I? That might've scared her. ~ Rick Riordan

If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I'd begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac ~ Timothy Leary

I think daycare is great for people who have to work two jobs. My problem is with people who are dropping kids off at daycare because they want to go out and spend the day golfing or getting their nails done. You know what I mean? That's not why they invented daycare. ~ Denis Leary

Most people don't know how underpaid and often ill-equipped urban fire departments are across North America. ~ Denis Leary

Heavy Metal fans are buying Heavy Metal records, taking the records home, listening to the records and then blowing their heads off with shotguns? Where's the problem? That's an unemployment solution right there, folks! It's called natural selection. ~ Denis Leary

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

Usually when you watch a film, you're just sort of biting your nails about things you could have done differently. ~ Denis Leary

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences. ~ Timothy Leary

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

Stolen pleasures are always more thrilling than those come by honestly. ~ Ann Leary

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads. ~ Denis Leary

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" ~ Timothy Leary

Firefighters are some of the most selfless public servants you will ever encounter. ~ Denis Leary

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

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? ~ Timothy Leary

Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics. ~ Denis Leary

I certainly know guys in comedy, I know some actors, and I definitely know some musicians, who have survived to a certain age and make a good living doing what they do, but nobody knows who they are. They wake up every day and they have the ability to get paid practicing their art, but underneath it all, if you scratched the surface, you still get, "If I only had my own show ... ," or "If I only had my own band ... " It's what people always do when they want to be their own star. ~ Denis Leary

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

Why hate someone for the color of their skin when there are much better reasons to hate them. ~ Denis Leary

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

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 ~ Timothy Leary

I take music pretty seriously. You see that scar on my wrist? You see that? You know where that's from? I heard the Bee Gees were getting back together again. I couldn't take it, OK! ~ Denis Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing. ~ Timothy Leary

You are a ghost, like you were a ghost before because you were never here, but everywhere at once, i wish i could talk like my eyes can see, word you with what i smell, knock your socks off with aromas of a tiny metropolis tourists only catch glimpses of at the Wharf. A thousand LSD trips and middle-aged folks remembering Timothy Leary playing like a Pied Piper leading them all off to jump off the pier. ~ Ana Castillo

I don't watch 'American Idol.' I don't watch any of that stuff. ~ Denis Leary

Most movies suck, even the independent ones. Hollywood is like baseball: Hit three good ones out of 10 and you're a Hall of Famer. ~ Denis Leary

I'm really good at laundry, and I have no problem cleaning the kitchen. ~ Denis Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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? ~ Timothy Leary

I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with. ~ Denis Leary

When I first got famous, Greg Dulli was also just starting to cook with the Afghan Whigs, and because of the MTV awards I met Dave Grohl and Nirvana and all these rock and roll bands. So I had experience with what it was like when people were taking off at that time. ~ Denis Leary

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

The second season is genrtrally easier do because you know the actors better and they know the characters better and if everybody likes each other you can really go all types of places. ~ Denis Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

Charlotte Rampling, when she was younger, looked exactly like my wife. That's one of the reasons that when I first saw my wife, my knees buckled. Based on her looks alone, she was already in my kitchen making eggs. ~ Denis Leary

It's hard to have a film and television career and do music work at the same time. ~ Denis Leary

In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, "It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it's there. If you're carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them. ~ Maxwell Maltz

I have good kids, I love my kids. I try to bring them up the right way, not spanking them. I find that I don't have to spank them. I find that waving the gun around pretty much gets the same job done! ~ Denis Leary

I've only done two other TV shows [instead of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll], one was Rescue Me and the other was a show called The Job, which was at ABC and only on for two seasons. ~ Denis Leary

The stuff I did in 'Rescue Me' was great. It gave me the opportunity to play comedy, and Denis Leary was the first one to take a chance with me. And from that experience, we had a comedy pilot that we did that I was going to play the lead in. And then 'Person of Interest' came along. They're all new experiences. ~ Kevin Chapman

Technology has robbed us of everything that made being human fun."

--Aristotle Leary
from Rubicon Harvest ~ C.W. Kesting

They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet. ~ Timothy Leary

The best comedy audiences in the country and this is tried and true, I'm not just saying it, in my opinion are Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago. ~ Denis Leary

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 ~ Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, Turn on, boot up, jack in. ~ Walter Isaacson

The first movie I saw where it convinced me I could be an actor was 'Mean Streets,' so whenever I see Robert De Niro and he says, 'Hi, Denis,' it's still a really big deal. ~ Denis Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

I don't want a president like me! I suck, okay. I want an elitist, smart guy. ~ Denis Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

I needed someone really intense, but also somebody with a lot of theatrical credibility. ~ Denis Leary

I love to smoke. I love to eat red meat. I'll only eat red meat that comes from cows who smoke, ok!? Special cows they grow in Virginia with voice boxes in their necks. "Moo" ~ Denis Leary

People saying, 'Life didn't turn out the way I wanted it to.' Welcome to the club. I wanted to be the starting center-fielder for the Boston Red Sox, for chrissakes! ~ Denis Leary

No matter what anybody says, relationships are based on physical attraction. The first time I saw my wife, it was pure animal whatever. ~ Denis Leary

Good actors, especially when they know their character, will come in and either tell you in advance that they have an idea, or in the middle of the rehearsal or the scene they'll let it loose and you go, 'Ah that's great.' ~ Denis Leary

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time. ~ Timothy Leary

My primary reason for bringing my son on was to have a voice on the show [Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll] that would bring a 25 or 26 year old point of view to it, and my son is very capable of writing that stuff. ~ Denis Leary

The filter's the best part. That's where they put the heroin. ~ Denis Leary

Inner reality is certainly more important than the outer reality. ~ Timothy Leary

It became sort of a snowball effect, with guys trying to deal in their own way with 9/11, whether it was drinking or whatever, ~ Denis Leary

I'd love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television. ~ Denis Leary