Timothy Leary Quotes

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.

I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

You cannot use butterfly language to communicate with caterpillars

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.

Despite the campaign rhetoric, the bureaucracies-big business and big government-are here to stay. The centralization effort cannot be checked. but it can be rationally directed towards our species goal: Space Migration, which in turn offers the only way to re-attain individual freedom of space-time and the small-group social structures which obviously best suit our nervous systems. It is another paradox of neuro-genetics that only in space habitats can humanity return to the village life and pastoral style for which we all long.

The most important thing you do in your life is to die.

Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.

To use your head, you have to go out of your mind.

All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE.

The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA.

Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration.

In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.

Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac

Giger’s work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going.

You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers.

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don't take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environnement.

The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment.

If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

Don't be intimidated by Caesar's Hollywood fake versions of religiosity. If life has a meaning for you beyond the TV-studio game, you are religious! Spell it out!

You are a powerful, unlimited and eternal soul who is here to enjoy the experience of creativity and contribute to humanity's evolution.

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

The neurogenetic meaning of the cultural revolution is now clear. Neurochemicals are designed to be pursuitist, not escapist. They open the nervous system to the possibilities of future post-terrestrial evolution.

Anything is possible after midnight.

Human beings have a right to change their consciousness, and it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.

One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.

LSD, wisely used by professionals, could reprogram enough nervous systems to accelerate consciousness and intelligence before we laid ourselves and our planet waste."To use your head you have to go out of your mind" "You are a God, act like one"

Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.

The program is a voyage chart, a series of signals, which, like the pilot's radio, provides the basic orienting information required for the trip.

They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet.

Drugs Are the Religion of the People ? The Only Hope is Dope.

Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital?

I'd just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven't heard a new idea in eight years. Let's get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That's the philosopher's job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.

The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form.

At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.

A man without justice is a beast, and a man who would make himself a beast forgets the pain of being a man.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.

There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them.

One cannot evolve from one's robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized.

I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.

Critics have told me I've ruined the lives of 50 million young people. I can't be certain of this, since only about 10 million have ever come back to thank me.

LSD is known to induce psychosis, in people who have never used it.

By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games.