Top 153 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Leary - Page 3

To the elitist hedonist, life is the avoidance of boredom and routine.

Followers do not like themselves, of course; that's why they crawl. And masters have nothing but contempt for their subservants, which is why they impose such colorful embarrassments upon them.

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.

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?

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

When men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.

Give death a better name or die trying.

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.

Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

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.

I declare that The Beatles are mutants.

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

The PC is the LSD of the '90s.

Half the things I've done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn't have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat.

I think that marijuana makes you stupid but sensual. I've watched many of my friends and loved ones become more erotic and dumber - just going around with a glazed expression on their faces from their last orgasms to the next - and found them really quite boring.

If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish 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.

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

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.

Tune in, turn on, and drop out.

Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go. Science is all metaphor. 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. If you don't like what you are doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. 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.

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

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

Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.

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

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

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