Dr. Timothy Leary: The League for Spiritual Discovery

Jan 1966 Radio interview with Dr. Timothy Leary and Elsa Knight Thompson.

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Dr. Timothy Leary]

"Psychedelic art is the public face of the communication device of our new religion."

"Man's attempt to turn on just staggers the imagination. There's hardly anything that hasn't been used one time or another, or in one culture or another, to get this [psychedelic] experience."

"We don't care what method people use [to turn on]. We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high, that can turn you on. But we also insist that no one tell us that we can't use our sacraments that seem to work for us."

"We're convinced, and I think it wouldn't be hard to prove my point, that most Americans are involved in a meaningless, robot, assembly-line series of activities. They don't really know what they're doing and why they're doing it, but they're just pushed off to this assembly-line and off they go."

"[By drop out] we mean drop out of the meaningless and tune in to the productive."

"You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses."

"There's no more room for mythological, supernatural religious teachers."

"We use this word 'psychosis' the way we used the word 'devil' or 'devil-possession' or 'witchcraft' two or three or four or five hundred years ago."

"When the time comes, let your kids turn you on. That's my message to the middle-age, middle-class, whiskey-drinking American suburban family."

"So jail to us is not a middle class disgrace. Here I am, a former Harvard professor, I've been arrested three times in the last year. Isn't that disgraceful? To me that just means I'm doing my job. And if I don't get the establishment a little worried, I wonder if my message is not getting through."