Timothy Leary
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.Collection: Radio
My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.Collection: People
Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.Collection: People
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.Collection: Garden
LSD is known to induce psychosis, in people who have never used it.Collection: Psychosis
Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.Collection: People
The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA.Collection: Dna
Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.Collection: Environment
I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.Collection: Pagan
Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.Collection: Civilization
Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.Collection: Challenges
Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth.Collection: Dna
Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.Collection: Intelligent
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.Collection: Revolution
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.Collection: Where We Come
I despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.Collection: Followers
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.Collection: Followers
Give death a better name or die trying.Collection: Names
LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Stupid
When men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Names
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.Collection: Philosophy
Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.Collection: Christian
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!Collection: Religious
If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Combination
Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.Collection: School
Romantic poetry and fiction of the last 2000 years has blinded us to the fact that emotions are a low form of jungle consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, dangerous form of fanatic stupor.Collection: Emotional
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.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Christian
The PC is the LSD of the '90s.Collection: Lsd
Tune in, turn on, and drop out.Collection: Tunes
To the elitist hedonist, life is the avoidance of boredom and routine.Collection: Boredom
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.Collection: People
We live our lives from A-Z, but forget the other 24 letters in between.Collection: School
The most important thing you do in your life is to die.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Moon
The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.Collection: Keys
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.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Government
The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.Collection: Stars
I declare that The Beatles are mutants.Collection: Mutants
If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Jobs
In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.Collection: Lsd
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.Collection: Jobs
Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D.Collection: Religious