The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.

As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or exotic aspect.

Human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth. It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable.

One of the most difficult features of direct experience is that it is unfiltered by any theories or expectations. It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed, but what can be observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories.

We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas.

At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.

I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.