Lsd Quotes & Sayings

The controlled-experiment people felt that public LSD orgies would lead to disaster for their own research. There was little optimism about what might happen when the Angels - worshiping violence, rape and swastikas - found themselves in a crowd of intellectual hipsters, Marxist radicals and pacifist peace marchers. It was a nervous thing to consider even if everybody could be expected to keep a straight head ... but of course that was out of the question. With everyone drunk, stoned and loaded, there was nobody capable of taking objective notes, no guides to soothe the flip-outs, no rational spectator to put out fires or hid the butcher knives ... no control at all. — Hunter S. Thompson

Do you think we would become a better civilization if we all took acid? TR: Oh, absolutely. I think that LSD is the genie in the bottle of the world. — Mara Altman

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again. — Iris Murdoch

I'm here today because of LSD. LSD gave me the confidence to be who I am today. Completely. — John Waters

As the LSD began to take effect, I suddenly said in a very loud voice, while pounding on top of a file, "Every psychiatrist, every psychoanalyst should be forced to take LSD in order to know what is over here." — John C. Lilly

When I saw the Pulse concert when I was 13 with the light show and all,
I thought,
I don't know what lsd is, but I wish I was on it right now. — Sienna McQuillen

Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity. — Timothy Leary

LSD is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be. — Albert Hofmann

LSD wanted to tell me something ... It gave me an inner joy, an open mindedness, a gratefulness, open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation. — Albert Hofmann

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

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.) — Sy Montgomery

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

Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil. — Patti Smith

The effects of mescalin or LSD can be, in some respects, far more satisfying than those of alcohol. To begin with, they last longer; they also leave behind no hangover, and leave the mental faculties clear and unimpaired. They stimulate the faculties and produce the ideal ground for a peak experience. — Colin Wilson

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

In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms. — Timothy Leary

When the light turns green, you go. When the light turns red, you stop. But what do you do when the light turns blue with orange and lavender spots? — Shel Silverstein

I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years - not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol ... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why. — Ozzy Osbourne

Bill Clinton does not inhale marijuana, right? You bet. Like I chew on LSD but I don't swallow it.' — Hunter S. Thompson

The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less. — Jerry Stahl

But if they don't try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. — Sam Harris

LSD lets you in on something. When you're tripping, the idea of race disappears; the idea of sex disappears; you don't even know what species you are sometimes. And I don't know of anybody who hasn't come back from that being more humane, more thoughtful, more understanding. — Ken Kesey

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott's raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions - no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim's own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another ... — Jon Ronson

Consider this:
1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?
And here's a bonus question:
2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle? — Brad Warner

I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley. — Albert Hofmann

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds actually wasn't meant to say LSD It was a drawing that John's son brought home from school Lucy was a kid in his school. — Paul McCartney

We had sold our death to somebody at the door for the sum of £70:18:6d and lent our fear to somebody at the door as well on interest of £3:10:0d per month, so we did not care about death and we did not fear again. — Amos Tutuola

An LSD experience without the LSD -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice. — Tom Wolfe

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one. — Federico Fellini

LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry "Wow!" all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects. — Stephen Fry

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it. — William Gibson

The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist. — William Everson

I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid. — Norman Mailer

How he could be a good user of LSD," I asked, "And know about the spiritual dimension - all that sort of thing - and still be a crook? I don't understand."
"Then it's time you did. Psychedelic drugs don't change you - they don't change you character - unless you want to be changed. They enable change; they can't impose it ... — Alexander Shulgin

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us. — Terence McKenna

Playboy: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?
McLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant. — Marshall McLuhan

The peak of empathogens can be characterised as earthly paradise in comparison to the heavenly paradise of LSD and hallucinogens of that category. — Claudio Naranjo

I've never seen crack or a lot of these new drugs. Don't know anything about them. I don't know what they do for you, or whether they do anything good for you or not. But I do still have a lot of faith in the spiritual purity of LSD and pot. — Ken Kesey

LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you. — Alan Watts

Some of them screamed. Some of them wept. Some of them grinned like LSD was a blast. A case officer said John Stanton hatched the idea - lets flood Cuba with this shit before we invade. Langley co-signed the brainstorm. Langley embellished it: Let's induce mass hallucinations and stage the second coming of Christ!!!! Langley found some suicidal actors. Langley dolled them up to look like J.C. Langley had them set to pre-invade Cuba concurrent with the dope saturation. Peter howled. The case officer said, 'It's not funny.' A drug-zorched peon whipped out his wang and jacked off. — James Ellroy

Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition. — Rajneesh

I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild. — Albert Hofmann

Are you for LSD?" "I don't use it." "Don't you think it's a passing fad?" "Nothing that is against the law ever ceases to exist." "Whatcha mean?" "Forget it." "Whatcha think of the hippies?" "They don't harm me." "Their hair stinks," he said. "They don't take baths. They don't work." "I don't like to work either." "Anything — Charles Bukowski

The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture. — Ralph Metzner

Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality. — Stanislav Grof

The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself - Now - and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out the moment, back to the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve — Tom Wolfe

Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD. — Terence McKenna

I believe it's true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event. — Ralph Metzner

Crashing from love is worse than crashing from pot, or LSD, or going cold turkey from heroin. Nobody should be allowed to do love. Love should be illegal. — Doug Shear

My total sellout to LSD, marijuana, and hashish, and to sex with virtually any attractive man, landed me in the hospital for four months. I was half dead from gonorrhea and a complete physical breakdown. — Susan Atkins

Whenever I put the headset on now," he'd continued, "I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about 'She loves you,' yeah well, you know, she does, she's any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the 'you' is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.
"Baby," she said, helpless, knowing of nothing she could do for this, and afraid for him.
He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. "That's LSD? — Thomas Pynchon

The first note in that octave [of our cultural transformation], the do, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943. — Ralph Metzner

It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. — Terence McKenna

We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music. — Jerry Garcia

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is. — Terence McKenna

Like something Disney might have envisioned if he'd taken a dose of LSD, backed up with a serving of psilocybin mushrooms, and a quart of tequila. — Faith Hunter

I'm a former hippie; I did drugs back when they were healthy. The only time I ever did LSD was at Disney World. I didn't go there - it came to me. I was Snow White. — Jim David

The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the "Watchtower" itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you're out, you're dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It's no wonder they keep getting busted. — Charles Bukowski

Very few people actually saw Andy's films like Chelsea Girls where he filmed seven hours, ran it on two screens, where each scene was in a different room at the Chelsea Hotel with these people he called 'Superstars who were basically super-exhibitionists - the guy in one room high on LSD talking about masturbation, Brigid Berlin in another room playing a lesbian and shooting up people with amphetamines right through their jeans, it was all real and they were really doing it (though Brigid is now a proper lady), but you know Andy really did pre-date reality TV. — Bob Colacello

I can say with confidence I know a fair bit about LSD. — Dan Rather

some of the guys went so far as to shoot up with LSD. Inject it. You can't do it to yourself because you can't look at your arm with the needle in it; that's a heavy thing to see while hallucinating on acid. It comes on that fast. You're high. There's no come-on. You're just there. It's instantaneous. — Bill Kreutzmann

Bob Riley, a kind soul who "treads lightly in this world," is in the 22nd year of a federal life without parole LSD sentence. — Benjamin

You are a ghost, like you were a ghost before because you were never here, but everywhere at once, i wish i could talk like my eyes can see, word you with what i smell, knock your socks off with aromas of a tiny metropolis tourists only catch glimpses of at the Wharf. A thousand LSD trips and middle-aged folks remembering Timothy Leary playing like a Pied Piper leading them all off to jump off the pier. — Ana Castillo

LSD stands out for learning to slow down. — Santosh Kalwar

Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child, — Albert Hofmann

Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD. — Jeff Lindsay

[In the 1960s] ... you could take LSD but you couldn't wear a pantsuit. — Betsey Johnson

My letters seeking a job, though truthful, diminished the full truth. Face would blanch if the facts had been complete: "Dear Sir," I thought. "Do you have a position for a journeyman burglar, con man, forger and car thief; also with experience as armed robber, pimp, card cheat and several other things. I smoked marijuana at twelve (in the 40's) and shot heroin at sixteen. I have no experience with LSD and methedrine. They came to popularity since my imprisonment. I've buggered pretty young boys and feminine homosexuals (but only when locked up away from women). In the idiom of jails, prisons and gutters (some plush gutters) I'm a motherfucker! Not literally, for I don't remember my mother. In my world the term, used as I used it, is a boast of being hell on wheels, outrageously unpredictable, a virtuoso of crime. Of course by being a motherfucker in that world I'm a piece of garbage in yours. Do you have a job? — Edward Bunker

[LSD] went on for years. I must have had a thousand trips. I used to just eat it all the time. — John Lennon

This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "conciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him ... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. — Hunter S. Thompson

I took LSD and listened to Coltrane a lot; a lot of people did. — Sam Andrew

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

Love is nature's LSD. You're going to see things that aren't really there. — Dov Davidoff

Sometimes I smoked opium. And I also took LSD - for a while, quite a lot of LSD, in fact. But I never had any bad experiences. I stopped in 1985. I'd had enough, and I don't miss it, either. — Wolfgang Beltracchi

All wars would end immediately if the various chiefs of state dropped a little LSD. — David Crosby

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality. — Terence McKenna

Did you ever consider that LSD was really one of the most dangerous drugs ever manufactured because the people who took it turned into yuppies? — Frank Zappa

The LSD experience usually changes forever the worldview and basic life-orientation of all who experience it — Ralph Metzner

St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution oil painting by Alex Grey, 2006 color image in the book Net of Being by Alex Grey, 2012 — Rhoney Gissen Stanley

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don't take trips on LSD. We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street, we like living right and free. — Merle Haggard

In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer - at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction ("Don't look in the mirror, Russ, it'll fuck your head up." Mental note: "Look in mirror."). I saw that my face wasn't my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I'd taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature. Not me, little ol' Russ, tossed about on turbulent seas; these distinctions were engineered. — Russell Brand

Here is the woman who had seriously considered taking LSD under the supervision of a medical doctor so she could have "a mind-altering experience," who had read herself straight out of Mormonism and into Eastern religious thought
but refused to replace one dogma with another. — Terry Tempest Williams

Jerry [Garcia] held his guitar and picked some random licks. I spoke from an LSD haze.

'LSD changes perception. Music transcends the musician. You are the vehicle for communication.'

Garcia stopped and stared at me.

'I practice,' Garcia declared. 'Anyone can do that.'

That shut me up and he returned to the guitar — Rhoney Gissen Stanley

He didn't look like an old hippie. Of course, you never could tell. His own elder brother had once spent a couple of years living in a Druidic commune, eating LSD doughnuts, and thinking he was a tree, since when he had gone on to become a director of a merchant bank. — Douglas Adams

Dyslexia, for me, is rather like being a six-fingered typist on LSD! — Stephen Richards

The function of the brain is to reduce all the available information and lock us into a limited experience of the world. LSD frees us from this restriction and opens us to a much larger experience. — Stanislav Grof

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat. — Walter Isaacson

Among the hardest hit was Terry the Tramp, who immediately loaded up on LSD and spent the next twelve hours locked in the back of a panel truck, shrieking and crying under the gaze of some god he had almost forgotten, but who came down that night to the level of the treetops and just stared - man, he just looked at me, and I tell you I was scared like a little kid. — Hunter S. Thompson

Jay Stevens's classic LSD history Storming Heaven — Michaelangelo Matos

As for LSD, I highly recommend it. We had a fine, wild weekend and no trouble at all. The feeling it produces is hard to describe. 'Intensity' is a fair word for it. Try half a cube at first, just sit in the living room and turn on the music - after the kids have gone to bed. But never take it in uncomfortable or socially tense situations. And don't have anybody around whom you don't like. — Hunter S. Thompson

Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that LSD can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly. — Robert Kennedy

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, Turn on, boot up, jack in. — Walter Isaacson

I've tried everything. I can say to you with confidence, I know a fair amount about LSD. I've never been a social user of any of these things, but my curiosity has carried me into a lot of interesting areas. — Dan Rather

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

I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions. — Charles Bukowski

I nod and I promise I will report any hallucinations to my mother, but I do not really believe I will hallucinate no matter what type of drugs he gives me, especially since I know he will not be giving me LSD or anything like that. I figure weaker people probably complain about their drugs, but I am not weak and I can control my mind pretty well. — Matthew Quick

The consciousness-expanding drugs - the hallucinogens, such as cannabis, mescaline, LSD, Psylocybin - I think are useful to a writer up to a certain point. That is, they open psychic areas that would not otherwise be available to the writer. But I feel that once these areas have been opened and the writer has reached them, he is able to get back there in the future without the drug. — William S. Burroughs

Psychoanalysis seemed an expensive, slow working, unreliable tranquilizer. If LSD were really to do what
Alpert and Leary claimed for it, all psychiatrists would be out of a job overnight. — Luke Rhinehart

did you ever consider that lsd and color TV arrived for our consumption around the same time? Here comes all this explorative color pounding, and what do we do? we outlaw one and fuck up the other. — Charles Bukowski

I'm always astonished when readers suggest that I must write my novels while high on pot or (God forbid!) LSD. Apparently, there are people who confuse the powers of imagination with the effects of intoxication. Not one word of my oeuvre, not one, has been written while in an artificially altered state. Unlike many authors, I don't even drink coffee when I write. No coffee, no cola, no cigarettes. There was a time when I smoked big Havana cigars while writing, not for the nicotine (I didn't inhale) but as an anchor, something to hold on to, I told myself, to keep from falling over the edge of the earth. Eventually, I began to wonder what it would be like to take that fall. So one day I threw out the cigars and just let go. Falling, I must say, has been exhilarating
though I may change my mind when I hit bottom. — Tom Robbins