TIMOTHY LEARY QUOTES
American psychologist & author (1920-1996)
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
How to Operate Your Brain
Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
You are a God
Act like one!
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
TIMOTHY LEARY
attributed, Was It Good for You Too?
Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
TIMOTHY LEARY
The Intelligence Agents
You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
TIMOTHY LEARY
attributed, Office Yoga: Simple Stretches for Busy People
The word "religion" beautifully defines itself, of course. It translates "to bind" from the Latin--"re" means back and "ligare" means to tie up. All religions are straightjackets, jackets for the straight.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Admit it. You aren't like them. You're not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the "normal people" as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like "Have a nice day" and "Weather's awful today, eh?" you yearn inside to say forbidden things like "Tell me something that makes you cry" or "What do you think deja vu is for?" Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everybody carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.
TIMOTHY LEARY
often attributed but unsourced
Drop Out--detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn On--find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune In--be reborn. Drop back in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Turn on, Tune in, Drop out
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 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.
TIMOTHY LEARY
LSD: Methods of Control
A confrontation with divinity, your own higher intelligence, is going to change you, and some people don't want change. They should be warned that if you come into this temple, you're going to face blazing activation of your brain. You're never going to be the same.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Drugs Are the Religion of the People -- The Only Hope is Dope.
TIMOTHY LEARY
The Politics of Ecstasy
All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Evolutionary Agents
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
Rolling Stone, Twentieth Anniversary Issue, 1987
A new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual's function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you're in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Chaos & Cyber Culture
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
Your Brain Is God
If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Changing My Mind, Among Others
If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain is God
Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in."
TIMOTHY LEARY
The Politics of Ecstasy