Best quotes by Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
American psychologist and author
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. He was "a hero of American consciousness", according to Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut".
As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary worked on the Harvard Psilocybin Project from 1960 to 1962. He tested the therapeutic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, which were legal in the U.S. at the time, in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Other Harvard faculty questioned his research's scientific legitimacy and ethics because he took psychedelics along with his subjects and allegedly pressured students to join in. But one of Leary's students, Robert Thurman, has denied that Leary pressured unwilling students. Harvard fired Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) in May 1963. Many people only learned of psychedelics after the Harvard scandal.
Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He used LSD himself and developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD. After leaving Harvard, he continued to publicly promote psychedelic drugs and became a well-known figure of the counterculture of the 1960s. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI²LE). Leary developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977) and gave lectures, occasionally calling himself a "performing philosopher".
During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested 36 times. President Richard Nixon once called him "the most dangerous man in America".
Timothy Leary quotes by category:
LSDTimothy LearyIn a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.
PerceptionConsciousnessThe brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.
LifeMy 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.
InfluenceGratitudeCriticismCritics 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.
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.
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 LearyPsychedelic DrugsPursuing 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.
IndividualismNon-ConformityCountercultureMy 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.
SkepticismThink for yourself. Know what you're doing. Question authority.
TalkingThinkingI'd just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven't heard a new idea in eight years. Let's get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That's the philosopher's job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.
TechnologyEvolutionImmortalityThe 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.
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.
InnovationUnderstandingAccomplishmentNobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing.
Ritual is to the internal sciences what experiment is to the external sciences.
IntelligenceDrugsAt 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'.
We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.
NatureEducationPeople 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.
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 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.
ConsciousnessIndividual 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.
Self-PerceptionSelf-RealizationSelf-EmpowermentYou are a God Act like one!
ConsciousnessThere's one uneasy borderline between what is external and what is internal, and this borderline is defined exactly by the sense organs and the skin and the introduction of external things within my own body. Consciousness is altered by physical events and physical objects, which impinge upon my sense organs, or which I introduce into my body. Now the name traditionally given to external objects or processes which change you internally is sacrament. Sacraments are the visible and tangible techniques for bringing you close to your own divinity.
IntelligenceEvolutionHigher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.
FaithEverything 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.
ListeningFalling In LoveTimothy LearyIf you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.
EmotionsFictionRomantic 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.
TimeArtIdentityEvolutionGiger’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.
Timothy LearyI despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.
MeaningActions 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.
Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth.
If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.
DrugsReligionPsychedelic DrugsIf 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.
DrugsLSDTimothy LearyPsychedelic DrugsLSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.
They've outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet.
TechnologyDrugsLSDThe PC is the LSD of the '90s.
CreativityTeachingWhen you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
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.
AppearancePowerViolenceWhen men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.
To the elitist hedonist, life is the avoidance of boredom and routine.
GenerationIntelligenceEducationPotentialFrustrationWe are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
HollywoodTimothy LearyDon'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!
RebellionPsychedelic DrugsCountercultureTune in, turn on, and drop out.
SpiritualityTechnologyRecite 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?
ScienceMetaphorTimothy LearyScience is all metaphor.
SinReligionEach 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 LearyCivilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
Self-ReflectionMistakesRegretHalf 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.
IntelligenceI 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.
Self-ReflectionExplorationAdviceCountercultureMy advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.
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.
Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.
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.
LSDTimothy LearyLSD is known to induce psychosis, in people who have never used it.
PoliticsTimothy LearyI've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
HopeDrugsReligionTimothy LearyDrugs Are the Religion of the People ? The Only Hope is Dope.
Timothy LearyOur assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.
Timothy LearyI declare that The Beatles are mutants.
EvolutionThat 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.
InfluenceGratitudeDrugsCountercultureSeven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.
EvolutionTimothy LearyThe mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA.
AdaptationIndividual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.
Personal BeliefsSelf-IdentitySpiritualityI have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.
SciencePhilosophyGenerationEducationWe are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go. Science is all metaphor. 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. If you don't like what you are doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. 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 LearyDrop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.
UnderstandingPsychedelic DrugsYou simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers.
Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.