Quotes from Timothy Leary

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.

Science is all metaphor.

Give death a better name or die trying.

There are three side effects of acid. Enchanced long term memory, decreased short term memory, and I forget the third.

Turn on, tune in and drop out.

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

You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light

The goals of an intelligent life, according to Socrates, is to pursue the philosophic quest—to increase one's knowledge of self and world.

I'm looking forward to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying.

You can be anyone this time around.

I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?

as a guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain

People ask me how many times I've taken LSD--and I don't count. But it's the same thing when they ask me how many times I've made love. The answer is, not enough.

I was ovulated, fertilized, and born in the 20th century. I can't wipe out my whole personal background, or the fact that almost everyone I talk to today is brain-damaged by our education. I think American education makes us hopeless symbol addicts. It's designed to produce docile automatons. But it's going to take years before you can urge young people to drop out of school without appearing to be an eccentric or a mad-man.

Thou shalt not alter thy brother's consciousness without his consent. - The Second Commandment of Leary

The old cliche must be up-dated: crime does not pay for the three victims of every crime-the victim, the tax-payer and the crook. Crime does pay, however, and handsomely, for the attorneys who produce the National Crime-Sin Show.

question authority

Close your eyes and listen... and learn that it's the oldest message of love and peace and laughter, and trust in God and don't worry, trust in the future, and don't fight; and trust in your kids, and don't worry because it's all beautiful and right.

All deities and demons, all heavens and hells are internal.

a man--venerable, with a white beard, or on a cross, or as a baby, or a sage seated in the full lotus position. Are these not limiting incarnations, temporary housings, of the great energy process?

We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard...believing that it was a time for visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible meta-physics was needed.

All of this educational work was enormously successful. Millions of Americans accepted the "head philosophy," the belief that Ego and "Social Reality" are neural fictions.

The essence of "new" is, of course, the modern version of Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats. American civilization, for certain explicit biblical reasons, apparently requires that its leaders, its political heroes be publicly sacrificed.