Timothy Leary Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

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

Timothy Leary
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.

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

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

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

Timothy Leary
Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.

Timothy Leary
Prayer is ecstatic communication with your innernavigational computer.

Timothy Leary
After you turn on, don't spend the rest of your life contemplating the inner wonders. Begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty.

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

Timothy Leary
When men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.

Timothy Leary
Don'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!

Timothy Leary
One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.

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

Timothy Leary
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.

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

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
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.

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

Timothy Leary
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.

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

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
I declare that World War III is now being waged by short-haired robots whose deliberate aim is to destroy the complex web of free wild life by the imposition of mechanical order.

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
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.

Timothy Leary
If 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.

Timothy Leary