Timothy Leary Quotations

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

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

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.

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.

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

Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.

I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

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

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

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.

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.

Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.

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.

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

The aim of human life is to know thyself. Think for yourself. Question authority. Think with your friends. Create, create new realities. Philosophy is a team sport. Philosophy is the ultimate, the ultimate aphrodisiac pleasure. Learning how to operate your brain, learning how to operate your mind, learning how to redesign chaos

Surfers are the ‘throw-aheads’ of mankind, not the dregs; they aren’t the black sheep of humanity, but the futurists and they are leading the way to where man ultimately wants to be. The act of the ride is the epitome of ‘be here now’, and the tube ride is the most acute form of that. Which is: your future is right ahead of you, the past is exploding behind you, your wake is disappearing, your footprints are washed from the sand. It’s a non-productive, non-depletive act that’s done purely for the value of the dance itself. And that is the destiny of man.

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.

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

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.

If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.

You cannot use butterfly language to communicate with caterpillars

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.

Think for yourself and question authority.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly

Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration.

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.

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

Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.

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

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

Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.

The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Man's best friend is his dogma.

Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others...

Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac

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.

The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems able to escape from the doomed planet and contact manifestations of the same amino-acid seeding that have evolved in other solar systems. The mission is the message--to escape and come home.

Express the psychedelic with the cybernetic. Turn on, tune in and boot up.

Anything is possible after midnight.

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

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

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.

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.

People have to go out of their mind before they can come to their senses.

Grow within the flow.

The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don't take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environnement.

I wanted to scientize myth and mythologize science.

The universe is an intelligence test.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

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.

Prayer is ecstatic communication with your innernavigational computer.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing.

What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

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.

All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE.

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.

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

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.

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.

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.

Remember also: beyond the restless flowing electricity of life is the ultimate reality- The Void. Your own awareness, not formed into anything possessing form or color, is naturally void. The Final Reality. The All Good. The All Peaceful. The light. The Radiance. The movement is the fire of life from which we all come. Join it. It is part of you.

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

I despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.

At every level there are eight stages of intelligence. You have to turn your brain on to the circuits that are used at that level of intelligence. And there are ways to change the human brain to different stages. The things that change your brain are called 'drugs'.

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

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

Science is all metaphor.

Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth.

They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet.

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.

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

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.

Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.

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"

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

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in.

Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.

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

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

I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.

The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA.