Top 120 Timothy Leary Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “Science is all metaphor.”

— Timothy Leary

52. “In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.”

— Timothy Leary

53. “Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.”

— Timothy Leary

54. “Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.”

— Timothy Leary

55. “A man without justice is a beast, and a man who would make himself a beast forgets the pain of being a man.”

— Timothy Leary

56. “Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time.”

— Timothy Leary

57. “Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.”

— Timothy Leary

58. “Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.”

— Timothy Leary

59. “Prayer is ecstatic communication with your innernavigational computer.”

— Timothy Leary

60. “What human beings consciously wish is often quite at variance with the results their reflex patterns automatically create for them.”

— Timothy Leary

61. “Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love.”

— Timothy Leary

62. “The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment.”

— Timothy Leary

63. “Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.”

— Timothy Leary

64. “My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

— Timothy Leary

65. “We live our lives from A-Z, but forget the other 24 letters in between.”

— Timothy Leary

66. “People have to go out of their mind before they can come to their senses.”

— Timothy Leary

67. “There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.”

— Timothy Leary

68. “The word “religion” beautifully defines itself, of course. It translates “to bind” from the Latin – “re” means back and “ligare” means to tie up. All religions are straightjackets, jackets for the straight.”

— Timothy Leary

69. “The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

— Timothy Leary

70. “My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.”

— Timothy Leary

71. “To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.”

— Timothy Leary

72. “After you turn on, don’t spend the rest of your life contemplating the inner wonders. Begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty.”

— Timothy Leary

73. “One cannot evolve from one’s robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized.”

— Timothy Leary

74. “You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers.”

— Timothy Leary

75. “If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.”

— Timothy Leary

76. “Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.”

— Timothy Leary

77. “Human beings have a right to change their consciousness, and it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.”

— Timothy Leary

78. “The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems able to escape from the doomed planet and contact manifestations of the same amino-acid seeding that have evolved in other solar systems. The mission is the message – to escape and come home.”

— Timothy Leary

79. “Giger’s work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going.”

— Timothy Leary

80. “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.”

— Timothy Leary

81. “By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games.”

— Timothy Leary

82. “I declare that The Beatles are mutants.”

— Timothy Leary

83. “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.”

— Timothy Leary

84. “Anything is possible after midnight.”

— Timothy Leary

85. “One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.”

— Timothy Leary

86. “Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.”

— Timothy Leary

87. “The neurogenetic meaning of the cultural revolution is now clear. Neurochemicals are designed to be pursuitist, not escapist. They open the nervous system to the possibilities of future post-terrestrial evolution.”

— Timothy Leary

88. “When men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.”

— Timothy Leary

89. “I despise followers of any kind, especially those who follow me.”

— Timothy Leary

90. “The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA.”

— Timothy Leary

91. “I’ve left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.”

— Timothy Leary

92. “Courage is the key to creativity and to any relinquishing of ego structure.”

— Timothy Leary

93. “You can be anyone this time around.”

— Timothy Leary

94. “I’m looking forward to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying.”

— Timothy Leary

95. “Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.”

— Timothy Leary

96. “They’ve outlawed the number one vegetable on the planet.”

— Timothy Leary

97. “Don’t be intimidated by Caesar’s Hollywood fake versions of religiosity. If life has a meaning for you beyond the TV-studio game, you are religious! Spell it out!”

— Timothy Leary

98. “The goals of an intelligent life, according to Socrates, is to pursue the philosophic quest – to increase one’s knowledge of self and world.”

— Timothy Leary

99. “Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key – it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.”

— Timothy Leary

100. “Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.”

— Timothy Leary