Timothy Leary

Sourced:

• "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."
  • [From Chaos and Cyber Culture]

• "That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA."
  • [Discussing CNN’s Crossfire, ca. 1992]

• "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."
  • [From The Politics of Ecstasy]

• "... and that 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." [From Timothy Leary's Last Trip]

• "Think for yourself and question authority." [From Timothy Leary's track on Sound Bites from the Counter Culture (Atlantic, 1989)]

• "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." [From How to Operate Your Brain (a guided meditation spoken by Timothy Leary and set to music)]

Attributed:

• "Science is all a metaphor."

• "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition."

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

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

• "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."

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

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

• "Why not?"
  • [According to witnesses, his last words before his death]

• "The mark of a basic shit is that he can’t mind his own business."

• "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."