Timothy Leary Quotes

“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.”
― Timothy Leary

“Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. It just takes a certain kind of perspective to see this. Realizing this can put our "analyzer" on hold, our interpretive mind on "ga-ga" and our hearts on breathless.”
― Antero Alli, Angel Tech: A Modern Shamans Guide to Reality Selection

“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, Chaos & Cyber Culture

“Like it or not, we are all insectoid aliens burrowing within our urbaniod bodies. -- Timothy Leary”
― H.R. Giger, ARh+

“Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson

“As for Crowley, his reputation grew and grew. His gospel of “Do what thou wilt”—modified and transformed—appealed strongly to the socially liberated sixties generation. He resurfaced as a countercultural icon; his photograph appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his ideas influenced everyone from Dr. Timothy Leary to the rock group Led Zeppelin. He was hailed as a prophet before his time for bringing together eastern and western esoteric traditions, and although he could never quite escape the “Satanist” tag that he had gained in the Edwardian newspapers, this ensured his present-day popularity.”
― George Pendle, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

“She didn't mind the streaks of color I'd left on her fur. Unlike me, she didn't see it as a mess.”
― Chelsea Sedoti, The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett

“When longing overtook them, they drew together and made the most intense and tender love Sarah had ever known. She was a freshly exposed nerve in the bleeding heart of Christ. He was devout in his reverent passion as her healer. Their love was a hallelujah chorus, a quiet prayer of exaltation, a holy union in the moonlight before dawn. It was here in this crystalline space that Sarah and Johnny took each other the true way to God, or they found God in each other, whichever it was.”
― Brenda Marie Smith, Something Radiates

“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

“As Baba Ram Dass (his ‘spiritual name’), Richard Alpert explained human attachment as a ‘clue that there’s work to be done’ – meaning that territoriality was remastered by him as dysfunctional and primitive, and as requiring the curative attentions of a guru, ordinarily an older man.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The culturally facilitated association of femininity with masochism was celebrated during the Psychedelic Revolution.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Let us consider a sad illumination. The Manhattan office worker moves througha clutter of factory-made, anonymous furniture to a plastic, impersonal kitchen, tobreakfast on canned, packaged anonymous food-fuel; dresses hirself in theanonymous-city-dweller costume, travels through dark tunnels of sooty metal andgray concrete to a dark metal room, foul with polluted air. All day s/he deals withsymbols that have no relevance to hir divine possibilities. This person issurrounded by the dreary, impersonal, assembly-line, mass-produced, anonymousenvironment of an automated robot, which perfectly mirrors hir “turned off’awareness.

When this person “turns on,” s/he sees at once the horror of hir surroundings. Ifs/he “tunes in,” s/he begins to change hir movements and hir surroundings sothat they become more in harmony with hir internal beauty. If everyone inManhattan were to “turn on” and “tune in,” grass would grow on First Avenueand tieless, shoeless divinities would dance or roller-skate down the carlessstreets. Ecological consciousness would emerge within 25 years. Fish would swimin a clear-blue Hudson.”
― Timothy Leary, Your Brain Is God