We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.

I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.

I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

It's the only hallucinogen I know, where if it's made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.

If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

The smart people who are straight are involved in simply the media management of what has turned into a slow apocalypse, spreading starvation, exacerbated class differences, toxified agriculture, so forth and so on. I don't believe the Establishment thinks there are solutions. Their policy is basically the management of panic, which is hardly a forward moving approach to the adventure of human civilization.