The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience.

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.

I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.

The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed.

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.