I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have ever confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control.
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As quoted in the BBC documentary The Beyond Within: The Rise and Fall of LSD (1987)Ken Kesey
"It’s when people begin using their religion as just a way of getting power over other people that scares me. I’m afraid that’s what’s going on in a lot of cases right now. When people deliberately tell lies, Creationism for instance, and pretend, “Oh, it’s not really religion”. I mean they know they’re lying, and yet they’re the religious people. There’s something wrong there."
Octavia Butler
Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man. I'm not worried about my soul.
Clarence Darrow
Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
Willa Cather
How can one person be more real than any other? Well some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are hiding- escaping encounters, avoiding suprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience- maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who are afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jackleg humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of liars hell. Some folks hide and some folks seek,and seeking when its mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous, can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look, and won't turn tail should they find it-and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway, because nothing, neither the terrible truth, nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth's sweet gas.
Tom Robbins
You know, I talk about doing acid 30 years ago. Rumsfeld must do it daily. Right before he goes out for a press conference: "Oh, hi... I notice the doorknobs are all crawling around the ceiling. Hello! Oh, there's CNN. Oh gee! Look at the big eye on that camera! Oh, God, get it away from me! And the teeth!" ... You think I'm kidding about this guy does acid? And he does the bad stuff. The brown acid. ... Where did this guy come from? What pit of Hell coughed this thug up?! ... Rummy comes out, all acid-headed up, just stoned on his ass - just completely freaked out. "Well, people are waving things at me, coming down the hall... And I don't know, there's stuff JUMPING OUT OF DOORS! ... GIMME SOME NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"
Mike Malloy
Kesey, Ken
Kesselring, Albert
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