Top 100 Timothy Leary Quotes
#1. 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
#2. We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.
Timothy Leary
#3. Living, dying, and thinking ... they're all team sports.
Timothy Leary
#4. Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.
Timothy Leary
#5. 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
#6. We live our lives from A-Z, but forget the other 24 letters in between.
Timothy Leary
#7. The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.
Timothy Leary
#8. I think that marijuana makes you stupid but sensual. I've watched many of my friends and loved ones become more erotic and dumber - just going around with a glazed expression on their faces from their last orgasms to the next - and found them really quite boring.
Timothy Leary
#9. We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
Timothy Leary
#10. To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.
Timothy Leary
#11. 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
#13. I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.
Timothy Leary
#15. Express the psychedelic with the cybernetic. Turn on, tune in and boot up.
Timothy Leary
#16. 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
#17. LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.
Timothy Leary
#18. The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment.
Timothy Leary
#19. To the elitist hedonist, life is the avoidance of boredom and routine.
Timothy Leary
#20. Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.
Timothy Leary
#21. Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love.
Timothy Leary
#23. 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
#25. If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.
Timothy Leary
#26. Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.
Timothy Leary
#27. You cannot use butterfly language to communicate with caterpillars
Timothy Leary
#28. I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
Timothy Leary
#29. Drugs Are the Religion of the People ? The Only Hope is Dope.
Timothy Leary
#30. Prayer is ecstatic communication with your innernavigational computer.
Timothy Leary
#31. 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
#32. We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.
Timothy Leary
#33. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games.
Timothy Leary
#34. 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
#35. You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.
Timothy Leary
#36. The program is a voyage chart, a series of signals, which, like the pilot's radio, provides the basic orienting information required for the trip ...
Timothy Leary
#37. 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
#38. My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.
Timothy Leary
#39. Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.
Timothy Leary
#40. I wanted to scientize myth and mythologize science.
Timothy Leary
#41. Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.
Timothy Leary
#43. 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
#45. In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.
Timothy Leary
#47. Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing.
Timothy Leary
#48. You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind
Timothy Leary
#49. Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.
Timothy Leary
#50. as a guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain,
Timothy Leary
#52. Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.
Timothy Leary
#53. If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
Timothy Leary
#54. Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them.
Timothy Leary
#55. 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
#57. Thou shalt not alter thy brother's consciousness without his consent. - The Second Commandment of Leary
Timothy Leary
#58. The most important thing you do in your life is to die.
Timothy Leary
#59. One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.
Timothy Leary
#60. To use your head, you have to go out of your mind.
Timothy Leary
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet.
Timothy Leary
#64. The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don't take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environnement.
Timothy Leary
#65. There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
Timothy Leary
#66. The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly
Timothy Leary
#67. Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
Timothy Leary
#68. 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
#69. People have to go out of their mind before they can come to their senses.
Timothy Leary
#70. 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
#71. Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.
Timothy Leary
#72. Don't be intimidated by Caesar's Hollywood fake versions of religiosity. If life has a meaning for you beyond the TV-studio game, you are religious! Spell it out!
Timothy Leary
#73. At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.
Timothy Leary
#74. Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.
Timothy Leary
#76. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
Timothy Leary
#77. Inner reality is certainly more important than the outer reality.
Timothy Leary
#78. Giger's work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going.
Timothy Leary
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. Any reality is an opinion-we make up our own reality
Timothy Leary
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.
Timothy Leary
#86. 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
#87. When men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.
Timothy Leary
#88. 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
#89. All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE.
Timothy Leary
#90. If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.
Timothy Leary
#91. Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.
Timothy Leary
#92. The neurogenetic meaning of the cultural revolution is now clear. Neurochemicals are designed to be pursuitist, not escapist. They open the nervous system to the possibilities of future post-terrestrial evolution.
Timothy Leary
#93. Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
Timothy Leary
#95. The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.
Timothy Leary
#96. 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
#97. LSD is known to induce psychosis, in people who have never used it.
Timothy Leary
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.
Timothy Leary
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