Timothy Leary (1920 – 1996)
American writer, psychologist, campaigner for psychedelic drug research and use, 1960s counterculture icon and computer software designer.
Anything that affects your senses ... is your business. If you want to kill yourself through nicotine or cyanide, it's your business.
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.
I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
After West Point and the priesthood, LSD must have seemed downright logical.
There's one uneasy borderline between what is external and what is internal, and this borderline is defined exactly by the sense organs and the skin and the introduction of external things within my own body. Consciousness is altered by physical events and physical objects, which impinge upon my sense organs, or which I introduce into my body.
Now the name traditionally given to external objects or processes which change you internally is sacrament. Sacraments are the visible and tangible techniques for bringing you close to your own divinity.
At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
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.
LSD is a drug that causes insanity in people who have not taken it.
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.