The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.