I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.

On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.

What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don’t go to the back side of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it, then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God did not retire to the seventh heaven, God is some kind of lost continent IN the human mind.