Timothy Leary Quotes & Sayings

There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third. — Timothy Leary

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

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. — Timothy Leary

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

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. — Timothy Leary

At the sensory level I am the divine receiving station...a two-legged, trembling-tissue, Jodrell Bank radar telescope, dancing, grumbling, sniffling Geiger counter"

"But there's an added feature. Each generation, I...return. Each time carried onstage, blinking, puking, bawling, bewildered by the bizarre novelty of each new drama, untutored in the language of the new script (did she say her name was Mommie?) — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.
Essentially, there's a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space. — Timothy Leary

The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment. — Timothy Leary

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

The PC is the LSD of the '90s. — Timothy Leary

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

A man without justice is a beast, and a man who would make himself a beast forgets the pain of being a man. — Timothy Leary

You are a powerful, unlimited and eternal soul who is here to enjoy the experience of creativity and contribute to humanity's evolution. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

When you get the message, hang up the phone. — Timothy Leary

TURN ON. to contact the ancient energies and wisdoms that are built into your nervous system. They provide unspeakable pleasure and revelation. TUNE IN. to harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. DROP OUT. detach yourself from the tribal game. current models of social adjustement - mechanized, computerized, socialized, intellectualized, televised, sanforized - make no sense to the new LSD generation who see clearly that American society is becoming an air-conditioned anthill. — Timothy Leary

Inner reality is certainly more important than the outer reality. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

We live our lives from A-Z, but forget the other 24 letters in between. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

LSD, wisely used by professionals, could reprogram enough nervous systems to accelerate consciousness and intelligence before we laid ourselves and our planet waste."To use your head you have to go out of your mind" "You are a God, act like one" — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love. — Timothy Leary

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 — Timothy Leary

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

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. — Timothy Leary

God #1 is the Single-cell Intelligence, the collaborative brain that knows how to run a simple protozoan. The First God is the one-celled God. The First and original craft of God is Protozoan. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

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

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. — Timothy Leary

Give death a better name or die trying. — Timothy Leary

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

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. — Timothy Leary

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? — Timothy Leary

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

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? — Timothy Leary

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? — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

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

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

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. — Timothy Leary

The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly — Timothy Leary

The universe is an intelligence test. — Timothy Leary

By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. — Timothy Leary

Grow with the flow — Timothy Leary

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. — 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 ... — Timothy Leary

One cannot evolve from one's robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

Think for yourself and question authority. — Timothy Leary

Think for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority. — Timothy Leary

Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful. — Timothy Leary

Living, dying, and thinking ... they're all team sports. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

The most important thing you do in your life is to die. — Timothy Leary

A country run by law is a country ruined by lawyers. It is neurologically impossible for a lawyer or a military man to think creatively or to act in harmony with nature. — Timothy Leary

Anything is possible after midnight. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular. — Timothy Leary

You cannot use butterfly language to communicate with caterpillars — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac — Timothy Leary

If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love. — Timothy Leary

We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual's function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you're in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit. — Timothy Leary

Man's best friend is his dogma. — Timothy Leary

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

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. — Timothy Leary

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

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out — Timothy Leary

To use your head, you have to go out of your mind. — Timothy Leary

Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons. — Timothy Leary

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top. — Timothy Leary

Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet. — Timothy Leary

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology. — Timothy Leary

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

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

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! — Timothy Leary

My favorite three words in the English language are: 'I don't know', because every time I say them, I learn something new. — Timothy Leary

One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body. — Timothy Leary

You are a God Act like one! — Timothy Leary

The general direction of evolution is to produce a serially imprinting, multibrained creature able to decipher its own program, create the technology to leave the planet and live in post-terrestrial mini-worlds, decode the aging sectors of the DNA code
thus assuring immortality, and act in harmony with stages of evolution to come. — Timothy Leary

Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing. — Timothy Leary

What human beings consciously wish is often quite at variance with the results their reflex patterns automatically create for them. — Timothy Leary

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. — Timothy Leary

Think for yourself. Question authority. — Timothy Leary