American psychologist & author (1920-1996)
When men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.
TIMOTHY LEARY
High Priest
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.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Flashbacks: An Autobiography
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
Changing My Mind, Among Others
We are them.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Musings on Human Metamorphoses
Grow within the flow.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.
TIMOTHY LEARY
"Leary calls LSD sacrament", The Tech, Nov. 8, 1966
I wanted to scientize myth and mythologize science.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain is God
Followers do not like themselves, of course; that's why they crawl. And masters have nothing but contempt for their subservants, which is why they impose such colorful embarrassments upon them.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Evolutionary Agents
That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Start Your Own Religion
We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Change Your Brain
Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Musings on Human Metamorphoses
I despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Musings on Human Metamorphoses
Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, narrowing, dangerous form of behavior.
TIMOTHY LEARY
The Politics of Ecstasy
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.
TIMOTHY LEARY
attributed, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Your Brain Is God
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.
TIMOTHY LEARY
attributed, The Best Advice Ever for Teachers
What a struggle! Think of all the big powerful forces lined up ready to crush anything wonderful and holy and free!
TIMOTHY LEARY
High Priest