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The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly

Timothy Leary

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Timothy Leary
Age: 75 †
Born: 1920
Born: October 22
Died: 1996
Died: May 31
Actor
Psychologist
Writer
Springfield
Massachusetts
Timothy Francis Leary
Understand
Cannot
Caterpillar
Caterpillars
Butterfly
Drug

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Half the things I've done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn't have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat.
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If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
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Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
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Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.
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Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.
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Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.
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Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.
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By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games.
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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.
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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.
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Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them.
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One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.
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When you get the message, hang up the phone.
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We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.
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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.
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I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
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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
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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.
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Give death a better name or die trying.
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In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.
Timothy Leary