Top 200 Ken Kesey Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.”

— Ken Kesey

52. “But if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?”

— Ken Kesey

53. “More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face.”

— Ken Kesey

54. “We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.”

— Ken Kesey

55. “The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.”

— Ken Kesey

56. “The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.”

— Ken Kesey

57. “Listen, wait, and be patient. Every shaman knows you have to deal with the fire that’s in your audience’s eye.”

— Ken Kesey

58. “But I tried though,” he says. “Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn’t I?”

— Ken Kesey

59. “The truth doesn’t have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.”

— Ken Kesey

60. “The ’60s aren’t over; they won’t be over until the Fat Lady gets high.”

— Ken Kesey

61. “I discovered at an early age that I was – shall we be kind and say different? It’s a better, more general word than the other one... I got sick... It was the feeling that the great, deadly pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me – and the great voice of millions chanting, “Shame. Shame. Shame.” It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different.”

— Ken Kesey

62. “I’ve heard that theory of the Therapeutic Community enough times to repeat it forwards and backwards – how a guy has to learn to get along in a group before he’ll be able to function in a normal society; how the group can help the guy by showing him where he’s out of place; how society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up.”

— Ken Kesey

63. “When you love someone it is forever, or it was never really love at all.”

— Ken Kesey

64. “What we hoped was that we could stop the coming end of the world.”

— Ken Kesey

65. “Of offering more than what I can deliver, I have a bad habit, it is true. But I have to offer more than I can deliver, To be able to deliver what I do.”

— Ken Kesey

66. “There’s no disgrace in failing, lad, Though friends and foes deride; In fact, a failure’s not so bad As never having tried.”

— Ken Kesey

67. “I’ve never seen crack or a lot of these new drugs. Don’t know anything about them. I don’t know what they do for you, or whether they do anything good for you or not. But I do still have a lot of faith in the spiritual purity of LSD and pot.”

— Ken Kesey

68. “I used to think we were going to win in the ’60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.”

— Ken Kesey

69. “I been away a long time.”

— Ken Kesey

70. “The frontiers we broke into in the ’60s are still largely unexplored.”

— Ken Kesey

71. “He had come to life for maybe a minute to try to tell us something, something none of us cared to listen to or tried to understand, and the effort had drained him dry.”

— Ken Kesey

72. “Things you think you’re saying for the first time ever, have been said better before by Shakespeare, though they may need saying again.”

— Ken Kesey

73. “There’s a lot of people who don’t understand the circle crops in England. Pure enigma.”

— Ken Kesey

74. “That ain’t me, that ain’t my face. It wasn’t even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn’t even really me them; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted.”

— Ken Kesey

75. “He knows that there’s no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who’s trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you’re not bothered.”

— Ken Kesey

76. “What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.”

— Ken Kesey

77. “I don’t think you fully understand the public, my friend; in this country, when something is out of order, then the quickest way to get it fixed is the best way.”

— Ken Kesey

78. “But the rest are even scared to open up and laugh. You know, that’s the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn’t anybody laughing. I haven’t heard a real laugh since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”

— Ken Kesey

79. “Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.”

— Ken Kesey

80. “But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.”

— Ken Kesey

81. “If you’ve got love in your heart, whatever you do from that moment out is likely to be right. If you’ve got that one true note ringing inside you, then whatever you do is going to be OK.”

— Ken Kesey

82. “You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”

— Ken Kesey

83. “Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery.”

— Ken Kesey

84. “What can you pay for the way a man lives? What can you pay for what a man is?”

— Ken Kesey

85. “The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn’t pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to.”

— Ken Kesey

86. “Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.”

— Ken Kesey

87. “The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon.”

— Ken Kesey

88. “We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind.”

— Ken Kesey

89. “Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren’t for the cartoon figures being real guys...”

— Ken Kesey

90. “They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.”

— Ken Kesey

91. “A sound of cornered animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed a coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care about anything, but himself and his dying.”

— Ken Kesey

92. “You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.”

— Ken Kesey

93. “I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. Oh yeah, well I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!”

— Ken Kesey

94. “I had to keep on acting deaf if i wanted to hear at all.”

— Ken Kesey

95. “He’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.”

— Ken Kesey

96. “Anti-drug fanatics and cops are the criminals – it’s like McCarthyism. They need someone to dislike to distract the public from the really important problems.”

— Ken Kesey

97. “I can’t help it. I was born a miscarriage. I had so many insults I died. I was born dead. I can’t help it. I’m tired. I’m give out trying. You got chances. I had so many insults I was born dead. You got it easy. I was born dead an’ life was hard. I’m tired. I’m tired out talking and standing up. I been dead fifty-five years.” The.”

— Ken Kesey

98. “The same old rain, and, if not welcomed, at least accepted – an old gray aunt who came to visit every winter and stayed till spring. You learn to live with her. You learn to reconcile yourself to the little inconveniences and not get annoyed. You remember she is seldom angry or vicious and nothing to get in a stew about, and if she is a bore and stays overlong you can train yourself not to notice her, or at least not to stew about her. Which.”

— Ken Kesey

99. “I was raised a Christian and was a stone-faced acid head.”

— Ken Kesey

100. “He’s safe as long as he can laugh, he thinks, and it works pretty fair.”

— Ken Kesey