“You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.”
As quoted in Office Yoga : Simple Stretches for Busy People (2000) by Darrin Zeer, p. 52
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Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary:
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Famous Timothy Leary Quotes
“If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.”
Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982)
“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
As quoted in Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1987) by Robert Byrne, #40
“Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim.”
Timothy Leary's Last Trip (1997)
Context: 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.
“Think for yourself and question authority.”
Timothy Leary's track on Sound Bites from the Counter Culture (1989)
Timothy Leary Quotes about life
"The Seven Tongues of God"
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
CBC Documentary: How To Go Out of Your Mind: The LSD Crisis (1966)
Context: We always have urged people: Don't take LSD unless you are very well prepared, unless you are specifically prepared to go out of your mind. Don't take it unless you have someone that's very experienced with you to guide you through it. And don't take it unless you are ready to have your perspective on yourself and your life radically changed, because you're gonna be a different person, and you should be ready to face this possibility.
On the Castalia Institute in Millbrook, New York; quoted in Storming Heaven : LSD and the American Dream (1998) by Jay Stevens, p. 208
"Neurological Politics"'
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Timothy Leary Quotes about people
A Trip with Paul Kassner <!-- Politics of Ecstasy 1999 p. 215 -->
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Context: My 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.
Attributed to Leary by Terence McKenna in one of his talks ( "The World and Its Double" https://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/The+World+And+Its+Double, 11 September 1993, Nature Friends Lodge, Sierra Madre, CA), though he also stated[citation needed] Leary denied ever having said it.
Misattributed
“Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.”
Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010), p. 202
LSD: Methods of Control (1966)
“Drugs Are the Religion of the People — The Only Hope is Dope”
Section title in "The Seven Tongues of God"
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
Timothy Leary: Trending quotes
Harvard Law School Forum (1966)
“They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.”
Interview by David Sheff in Rolling Stone Twentieth Anniversary Issue (1987)
Context: 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 Quotes
“To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.”
Changing My Mind, Among Others : Lifetime Writings (1982), p. 76; also in Change Your Brain (2000), p. 72
Context: To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal. The training of artists and creative performers can be a straightforward, almost mechanical process. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
Changing My Mind, Among Others : Lifetime Writings (1982), p. 76; also in Change Your Brain (2000), p. 72
Context: To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal. The training of artists and creative performers can be a straightforward, almost mechanical process. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
Timothy Leary
book
Flashbacks
Source: Flashbacks, An Autobiography (1983), p. 388
Context: While sitting in my prison cell, I was astonished to hear the local rock station play a new song by the Beatles entitled "Come Together." Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way. (I must explain that even the most good-natured persons tend to be a bit touchy about social neglect while in prison). When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit: that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.
“He's basically a romantic comedian.”
Commenting on G. Gordon Liddy's 1994 remarks on shooting intruding ATF agents, and a 1966 raid by Liddy in which Leary had been arrested, in "Timothy Leary Revisited" a 1995 interview, in Paul Krassner's Impolite Interviews (1999) by Paul Krassner, p. 304
Context: He's basically a romantic comedian. …. He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life, and I have no intention of owning a weapon, although I was a master sharpshooter at West Point on both the Garand, the Springfield rifle and the machine-gun. I was a howitzer expert. I know how to operate these lethal gadgets but I have never had and never will have a gun around.
The Purpose of Life is Religious Discovery
Start your own Religion (1967)
The Psychedelic Experience (1995)
Context: 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.
This period of robotization is called the Kali Yuga, the Age of Strife and Empire...
The Purpose of Life is Religious Discovery
Start your own Religion (1967)
“We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history.”
Interview by David Sheff in Rolling Stone Twentieth Anniversary Issue (1987)
Context: 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.
As quoted in Shout! (1981) by Philip Norman, p. 365; and in An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 303
Source: Chaos & Cyber Culture
“The universe is an intelligence test”
As quoted in Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) by Robert Anton Wilson, p. 170
Timothy Leary
book
Flashbacks
Flashbacks, An Autobiography (1983)
Grace Slick, and Leary are both quoted in the Infected Mushroom song "Drop out" on the EP Deeply Disturbed (2003), but only the final portion actually quotes Leary.
Misattributed
Commenting on surrealist H. R. Giger. [Martin, Douglas, H. R. Giger, Swiss Artist, Dies at 74; His Vision Gave Life to ‘Alien’ Creature, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/arts/h-r-giger-swiss-artist-dies-at-74-his-vision-gave-life-to-alien-creature.html, 14 May 2014, New York Times, 14 May 2014]
How to Operate Your Brain (1994) http://yoism.org/?q=node/47, a guided meditation spoken by Timothy Leary and set to music.
The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
The Intelligence Agents (1996)
As quoted in Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia : How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings (2005), by Rob Brezsny, p. 8
“The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.”
Harvard Law School Forum (1966)
“That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.”
Discussing CNN’s Crossfire as quoted in Rolling Stone (14 December 1989)
Harvard Law School Forum (1966)
At the Neo-Pagan Starwood Festival (July 1991), recorded on Timothy Leary Live at Starwood (2001) http://www.freetimes.com/story/3493 by the Association for Consciousness Exploration ISBN 1-59157-002-6
In a Stanley Siegel interview (c. 1977) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HrdNRvJ7-8, with phone commentary by Art Linkletter who blamed his daughter's death on her involvement with LSD.
As quoted in The Best Advice Ever for Teachers (2001) by Charles McGuire and Diana Abitz, p. 57
Drop Out, Turn On. Tune In.
Start your own Religion (1967)
Timothy Leary
book
Flashbacks
Flashbacks (1983)
“Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.”
As quoted in Still Casting Shadows : A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History (2006) by B. Clay Shannon, p. 376
On being brought back to life, during the period in which he considered putting his body into cryonic suspension, as quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said About Republicans (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 130
The Psychedelic Experience (1964), p. 12
“The mark of a basic shit is that he can’t mind his own business.”
Though at times attributed to Leary on the internet, no published source of this has been located. It is a misquote of a William S. Burroughs reading entitled M.O.B. from the Giorno Poetry Systems boxed set. M.O.B. was an extension of Burroughs' expression in The Place of Dead Roads (1983), p. 155:
You are a Shit Spotter. It's satisfying work. … We have observed that most of the trouble in the world has been caused by ten to twenty percent of folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus … The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right.
Misattributed
