Timothy Leary Quotes

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

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

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

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

question authority ~ Timothy 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayer is ecstatic communication with your innernavigational computer. ~ Timothy Leary

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

The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

I knew [Timothy] Leary, but barely knew, didn't really know Jan [Kerouac]. ~ William S. Burroughs

The PC is the LSD of the '90s. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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

It wasn't until after I'd been around Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that I started to reflect about issues like the evolution of consciousness. ~ Ram Dass

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

Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. It just takes a certain kind of perspective to see this. Realizing this can put our "analyzer" on hold, our interpretive mind on "ga-ga" and our hearts on breathless. ~ Antero Alli

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

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people. ~ Timothy Leary

Tune in, turn on, and drop out. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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

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

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.) ~ Sy Montgomery

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

Think for yourself. Question authority. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Timothy Leary

Science is all metaphor. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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. ~ Timothy Leary

I only had to drop acid once to know that Timothy Leary was right about questioning authority.

Motorcycling is like life. There's nothing solid about it. Something not even the asphalt under your tires.

Time on a motorcycle is unlike time spent anywhere else. There are moments lost in the landscape, seconds devoted solely to balance, and long stretches spent spiraling inward. ~ Barbara Schoichet

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

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

You get the Timothy Leary you deserve. ~ Don Lattin

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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? ~ Timothy Leary

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. ~ Timothy Leary

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

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