Quote collection
705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness."
"What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is."
"I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own."
"I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that."
"I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain."
"What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability."
"History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense."
"I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics."
"A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It's changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it's changing, and there are many many possibilities."
"The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics."
"It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is."
"And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings."
"It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable."
"Culture is another dimension."
"I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally."
"Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means."
"We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer."
"There will be difficult moments in a five-gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is."
"The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech."
"In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation."