Who is Timothy Leary
To a generation in full revolt against any form of authority, “Tune in, turn on, drop out” became a mantra, and its popularizer, Dr. Timothy Leary, a guru. A charismatic and brilliant psychologist, Leary became first intrigued and then obsessed by the effects of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s while teaching at Harvard, where he not only encouraged but instituted their experimental use among students and faculty. What began as research into human consciousness turned into a mission to alter consciousness itself. Leary transformed himself from serious social scientist into counterculture shaman, embodying the idealism and the hedonism of an age of revolutionary change.
Timothy Leary is the first major biography of one of the most controversial figures in postwar America.
Timothy Leary Quotes
1. Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
2. Thou shalt not alter thy brother’s consciousness without his consent. – The Second Commandment of Leary
3. Think for yourself. Question authority
4. You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind
5. 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.
6. LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it
7. And 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
8. Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac
9. 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.
10. A man–venerable, with a white beard, or on a cross, or as a baby, or a sage seated in the full lotus position. Are these not limiting incarnations, temporary housings, of the great energy process?
11. Turn on, Tune in, Drop out
12. The universe is an intelligence test.
13. If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you’d never fall in love.
14. Grow with the flow
15. The PC is the LSD of the ’90s
16. The most important thing you do in your life is to die.
17. God #1 is the Single-cell Intelligence, the collaborative brain that knows how to run a simple protozoan. The First God is the one-celled God. The First and original craft of God is Protozoan.
18. Just Say Know
19. We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.
20. I’m looking forward to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying.
21. Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.
22. Any reality is an opinion-we make up our own reality
23. Why not? Yeah
24. 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.
25. Courage is the key to creativity and to any relinquishing of ego structure.
26. In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he’d have a talk show.
27. Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition
28. A country run by law is a country ruined by lawyers. It is neurologically impossible for a lawyer or a military man to think creatively or to act in harmony with nature.
29. If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
30. The goals of an intelligent life, according to Socrates, is to pursue the philosophic quest—to increase one’s knowledge of self and world.
31. You can be anyone this time around.
32. I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?
33. Think for yourself. Question authority.
34. As a guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain,
