40 quotes
I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.
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.
The only abuse of drugs is the control of drugs by other people. ...The only control is self-control.
Harvard Law School Forum (1966)
Drugs Are the Religion of the People — The Only Hope is Dope
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
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's Last Trip (1997)
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.
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows — he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish.
In a Stanley Siegel interview (1977)
Anything that affects your senses … is your business. If you want to kill yourself through nicotine or cyanide, it's your business.
Harvard Law School Forum (1966)
An enormous amount of energy from every fiber of your body is released under LSD — especially sexual energy. There is no question that LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man.
Playboy interview (1966)
"Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity."
Flashbacks (1983)
The universe is an intelligence test
Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977)
We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.
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 four years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.
LSD: Methods of Control (1966)
What I feel or believe or experience is my business, and what I do is all our businesses; and reward or punish me according to whether I play the game well — ethically and rightly — or unethically.
Harvard Law School Forum (1966)
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.
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.
How to Operate Your Brain (1994)
The mark of a basic shit is that he can’t mind his own business.
Misattributed
LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.
Misattributed
But they all do sort of the same thing, and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and they remind you of the beauty of pretty simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from A to Z, that there's 24 letters in between...
You turn on... tune in... and you drop out...
Misattributed