Timothy Leary Lsd Quotes

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

The PC is the LSD of the '90s.

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.

People ask me how many times I've taken LSD--and I don't count. But it's the same thing when they ask me how many times I've made love. The answer is, not enough.

All deities and demons, all heavens and hells are internal.

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot up, jack in.

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)

Revolution without revelation is tyranny.

Nisker wasn’t really in the mood for an LSD trip. After all, he was in a car and heading toward the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then Scoop started thinking to himself. Well, the guy is the “high priest of LSD.” What else can I do? When else am I going to get a chance like this? So, Nisker dropped the acid. By the time they got to the radio station Scoop was so stoned he couldn’t put two words together. But Leary sat down behind the microphone and just let out all this beautiful, flowing prose. He was his usual glib, funny self. Nisker was melting into the floor, mumbling to himself. But there was Leary, totally in charge of himself—so charismatic, so facile. What a performance!

It is my obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers.

The Weather Underground's revolution is sputtering. ... All they managed to do is blow up a bunch of government commodes. FBI agents are laughing at them, calling them "the terrible toilet bombers." There is even a mocking ditty: "Weatherman, Weatherman, what do you do? Blow up a toilet every year or two.

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.

Megalomania is a common reaction to extensive LSD use, for once you are aware that your reality was created by yourself for your own benefit, it is hard to avoid getting a God complex.

The culturally facilitated association of femininity with masochism was celebrated during the Psychedelic Revolution.

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

When the three Ph.D.s, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, began experimenting on themselves with LSD-25 at Harvard in 1960, they were respectable and thoroughly academic psychologists. Later, Dr. Leary became a fugitive and an enthusiastic exponent of Aleister Crowley’s sex magic, after having passed through stages of trying to be an Oriental guru in hip clothing and a violent revolutionary in Marxist drab. Dr. Alpert has become “Baba Ram Dass,” an orthodox Hindu exponent of hatha-yoga. Dr. Metzner is devoting himself to teaching non-drug methods of consciousness-expansion, including yoga, Tarot cards, sex magic, the I Ching and alchemy. Almost certainly, the ideas that these men have encountered in the past years have played the major role in shaping their ideas. But it is almost equally certain that – as they believe themselves, and as their admirers and critics also tend to believe – LSD was a catalytic agent in propelling them out of the groves of academe into the wild blue yonder of unorthodoxy.

I am inclined to agree. A different view, however, is put forth by Dr. Andrew I. Malcolm, a Canadian psychiatrist who claims that LSD is an agent that specifically inclines people toward “alienation.” According to Dr. Malcolm, if you give enough acid to anybody, he will tend to enter “an altered state of consciousness” and will find the counterculture more attractive than the majority culture. Timothy Leary, Ph.D., as is well-known, agrees with Dr. Malcolm, except that he emphatically thinks this change is for the better, and Dr. Malcolm inclines to think it is for the worse. (He calls LSD “illusionogenic,” apparently thinking that “hallucinogenic” is not pejorative enough.)

John… people used to say to me… “Did the Buddha use drugs? Did the Buddha go on television?” I’d say, “Ahh—he would’ve. He would’ve.” —TIMOTHY LEARY, IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN LENNON

Of the great men of the past whom I hold up as models,” he tells people, “almost every one of them has been either imprisoned or threatened with imprisonment for their spiritual beliefs: Gandhi, Jesus, Socrates, Lao-tse… I have absolutely no fear of imprisonment… I know that the only real prisons are internal.

The Reagan-appointed judge who imposed the maximum sentence, up to ten years, called Leary an “insidious and detrimental influence on society… A pleasure-seeking, irresponsible Madison Avenue advocate of the free use of LSD and marijuana.

Among his peers and devotees, Leary is legendary for his Herculean ability to ingest frequent doses of extraordinarily potent LSD without ever being gripped by the monster of panic—the Great Fear that overwhelms so many users. His friends chalk it up to his sweeping intellect, his ability to outwit fear; or maybe it’s just his Irish pluck letting him mock the demons. He can take hit after hit of pure LSD and appear to be perfectly normal, whether he’s trading jokes with a glib TV talk show host or charming a millionaire hostess at a lavish dinner party in San Francisco. Leary grows more lucid on LSD, laughing easily as he becomes the smartest, wisest, most superior person in any setting.

I have been called an irrepressible optimist. The opposite of an irrepressible optimist is a repressive pessimist

and I was deeply intellectual. I had read and understood Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and the books written by Fabian socialists Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, etc. I had met Dr. Timothy Leary, the Harvard LSD guru, and Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I had seen the “great white light,” felt “cosmic consciousness,” and had undergone many other Eastern mystical experiences.

Only people like us still kept a watchful eye on Lud’s Drum, because dimensional barriers in and around the town had been dangerously weak ever since Timothy Leary dropped a heroic dose of LSD and peyote there and tried to perform a remote exorcism on the Pentagon.

The New Testament vision of the kingdom of God is no plunge into existential subjectivity, no phantasmagoric anti-intellectual experience, nor is it like being “turned on” by LSD even though ventured, as Timothy Leary would have it, as a sacred rite.