Think for yourself and question authority.
Timothy LearyRead
I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
Interpretation
This quote advocates for a mindful and informed approach to drug use while condemning impulsive consumption.
Timothy Leary emphasizes the importance of being knowledgeable and careful about drug use, balancing the potential benefits with awareness of risks. He expresses a strong opposition to using substances thoughtlessly, regardless of their nature, indicating that while he sees value in intelligent drug use, it is not a focal point in his life.
In practice
During a debate on drug policy in a college lecture.
Think for yourself and question authority.
There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don't take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environnement.
My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.
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.
If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first_x000D_ century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides_x000D_ telescopes are unnatural.
The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil
And make each day a critic on the last.
What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
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