Ken Kesey
There's something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.Collection: Gardening
People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.Collection: Love
The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn't pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to.Collection: Religion
The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.Collection: Truth
Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.Collection: Death
You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.Collection: Strength
People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.Collection: Society
You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.
You've got to get out and pray to the sky to appreciate the sunshine; otherwise you're just a lizard standing there with the sun shining on you.
It's time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. We've reached a certain point, but we're not moving any more.
I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
I was raised a Christian and was a stone-faced acid head.
If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?
The fundamentalists have taken the fun out of the mental.
The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.
To hell with facts! We need stories!
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
Fascism wants Baptism coast to coast.
I've been to too many Dead concerts. There've been smokin' holes where my memory used to be.
Ritual is necessary for us to know anything.
Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.
I used to think we were going to win in the '60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.
Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking.
When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it.
Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.
If grass were legalized, it would help our drug problem enormously.
The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.
There's a lot of people who don't understand the circle crops in England. Pure enigma.
Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that's in your audience's eye.
Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.
The frontiers we broke into in the '60s are still largely unexplored.
The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.
The Republican consciousness has no integrity and it falls apart once you check it out. If you're a Christian, why would you want to fry this dude?
When you're around the whole Dead scene, they're there as a tribal thing; they're there as part of a rendezvous and a pow-wow.
Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
Since we don't know where we're going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there.Collection: Together
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.Collection: Motivational
If you've got love in your heart, whatever you do from that moment out is likely to be right. If you've got that one true note ringing inside you, then whatever you do is going to be OK.Collection: Motivational
You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.Collection: Apples
It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.Collection: Inspirational
The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.Collection: Needs
I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil ? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it ? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control.Collection: Believe
When you love someone it is forever, or it was never really love at all.Collection: Forever
It is just as much an offense to take offense as it is to give offense.Collection: Giving
You can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.Collection: Country
Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.Collection: Garden
All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.Collection: Psychology
There's no disgrace in failing, lad, Though friends and foes deride; In fact, a failure's not so bad As never having tried.Collection: Failure