Timothy Leary Quotes

Timothy Leary delivers wild, mind-bending ideas about life, politics and religion that feel like a psychedelic chat.

63 quotes

1. People use the word 'natural' ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.

2. I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

3. If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.

4. 'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'

5. We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

6. Think for yourself and question authority.

7. That's the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.

8. I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.

9. The universe is an intelligence test.

10. Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities - the political, the religious, the educational authorities - who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing - forming in our minds - their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

11. 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.

12. A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

13. Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means 'submission'. The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.

14. Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say 'you are a sinner', and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.

15. We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.

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

17. In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

18. Why not?

19. Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

20. The only abuse of drugs is the control of drugs by other people. ...The only control is self-control.

21. What I feel or believe or experience is my business, and what I do is all our businesses; and reward or punish me according to whether I play the game well - ethically and rightly - or unethically.

22. There's one uneasy borderline between what is external and what is internal, and this borderline is defined exactly by the sense organs and the skin and the introduction of external things within my own body. Consciousness is altered by physical events and physical objects, which impinge upon my sense organs, or which I introduce into my body. Now the name traditionally given to external objects or processes which change you internally is sacrament. Sacraments are the visible and tangible techniques for bringing you close to your own divinity.

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

24. Anything that affects your senses ... is your business. If you want to kill yourself through nicotine or cyanide, it's your business.

25. That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden. An intricate web has been woven, a delicate fabric of chemical-electrical-seed-tissue=organism=species. A dancing, joyous harmony of energy transactions is rooted in the 12 inches of topsoil which covers the rock

26. The Purpose of Life is Religious Discovery

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

28. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to 'drop out,' 'turn on,' and 'tune in.' This period of robotization is called the Kali Yuga, the Age of Strife and Empire...

29. Actions which are conscious expressions of the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out rhythm are religious. The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search - for therein is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning. Anything else is a competitive quarrel over (or Hollywood-love sharing of) studio props.

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

31. If you are serious about your religion, if you really wist to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides telescopes are unnatural.

32. My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

33. My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

34. Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows - he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish.

35. But they all do sort of the same thing, and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and they remind you of the beauty of pretty simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from a to z, that there's 24 letters in between... You turn on... tune in... and you drop out...

36. Can you write something about everybody coming together?

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

38. Science is all a metaphor.

39. The mark of a basic shit is that he can't mind his own business.

40. Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

41. 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.

42. The most dangerous man in America.

43. After West Point and the priesthood, LSD must have seemed downright logical.

44. Man's best friend is his dogma.

45. 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...

46. Philosophy is a performance sport - you have to play it with somebody back and forth.

47. You are a God Act like one!

48. Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them.

49. Tune in, turn on, and drop out.

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

51. Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.

52. At the peak of his scientific triumphs, Newton became a 'head,' a student of the inner spiritual world - or in modern terms, a neurologician. Modern physicists do not dwell on this dramatic life-change in their hero.

53. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.

54. In the Eleusinian mysteries, they would always warn people, "if you go in here, your ego will die. You're going to have to confront all your past hang-ups, strip them off, and be a changed person." One emperor of Rom who wanted to be initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries said, "That's interesting, I approve of what you're doing, but I don't want to be changed.

55. At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.

56. Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.

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

58. Information is Power. Think For Yourself. CAUTION: proper use of the brain is not endorsed by federal governments nor huge corporations involved in serious financial profit from a brainwashed and enslaved population. Mild discomfort may occur as confusing independent thought challenges popular views of the world.

59. Acid is not for every brain … Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.

60. We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

61. 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.

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

63. Drop Out--detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn On--find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune In--be reborn. Drop back in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.