Quotes
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. -- Albert Einstein
It's good to realize that within us all there is somebody who knows everything. -- Herman Hesse
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans are suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are OK, then it's you. -- Rita Mae Brown
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Douglas Adams
Time's fun when you're having flies. -- Kermit the Frog
The best things in life are free.
The trees of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood from patriots and martyrs-Thomas Jefferson
Only when the last fish has been caught, the last tree has been felt,and the last river poisoned will man understand that you canīt eat money...
"Her eyes, she decides, could get accustomed to this darkness. Perhaps she should have lived in the night all along, with the owls and bats and other nocturnal creatures. Herminia told her once of the gods that rule the night, but Felicia cannot remember their names."
It's a mighty poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word. -- Andrew Jackson (Dreaming in Cuban, novel by Christina Garcia, 1992)
Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography. -- Paul Rodriguez
Sacred cows make the best hamburger. -- Mark Twain
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base. -- Dave Barry
Sure, it's kind of amazing to meet Nelson Mandela, get awards, meet royalty. But at the end of the day, you don't think you're famous. -- Melanie 'Scary Spice' Brown
Nature's tendency is always towards balance: when the world is cold, the will is warm. -- Michael Patrick
Chi Wen Tzu used to think thrice before acting. The Master hearing of it said, twice is quite enough. -- Confucius
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. -- Plutarch
A payphone in L.A. Look, it's a miracle. -- George Costanza
Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
A closed mouth gathers no feet. -- Finster's law
Acting...
You spend all your life trying to do something they will put you into asylums for...
-Jane Fonda
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man is worth your tears, but when you find the man who is worth your tears, he won't make you cry... -unknow
all you need is love... -john lennon
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake." - Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)
"Don't be so humble - you are not that great." - Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat
"His ignorance is encyclopedic" - Abba Eban (1915-)
"If a man does his best, what else is there?" - General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better." - A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)
"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." - Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
"Give me chastity and continence, but not yet." - Saint Augustine (354-430)
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei
"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work." - Emile Zola (1840-1902)
"This book fills a much-needed gap." - Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review
"The full use of your powers along lines of excellence." - definition of "happiness" by John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart." - e e cummings (1894-1962)
"Give me a museum and I'll fill it." - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
"Assassins!" - Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) to his orchestra
"I'll moider da bum." - Heavyweight boxer Tony Galento, when asked what he thought of William Shakespeare
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems." - Rene Descartes (1596-1650), "Discours de la Methode"
"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." - Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right." - Henry Ford (1863-1947)
"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'." - Yoda ('The Empire Strikes Back')
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." - H. G. Wells (1866-1946)
"I'll sleep when I'm dead." - Warren Zevon
"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
"Wit is educated insolence." - Aristotle (284-322 B.C.)
"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher." - Socrates (470-399 B.C.)
"Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." - Gore Vidal
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de St. Exupery
"Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them." - Samuel Palmer (1805-80)
"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." - Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)
"Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny." - Guy Davenport
"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." - Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
"We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?" - Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." - Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." - Paul Dirac (1902-1984)
"I would have made a good Pope." - Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." - John von Neumann (1903-1957)
"The mistakes are all waiting to be made." - chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956) on the game's opening position
"It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims." - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
"Grove giveth and Gates taketh away." - Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) on the trend of hardware speedups not being able to keep up with software demands
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation." - H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
"What do you take me for, an idiot?" General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy
"I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon." - Bill Hirst
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do." - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." - Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)
"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)
"A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
"Logic is in the eye of the logician." - Gloria Steinem
"No one can earn a million dollars honestly." - William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)
"Everything has been figured out, except how to live." - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech." - Martin Fraquhar Tupper
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas (1900-1966)
"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it." - Groucho Marx (1895-1977)
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy." - Goethe (1749-1832)
"In the end, everything is a gag." - Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people." - Lucille S. Harper
"You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." - Yogi Berra
"I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known." - Walt Disney (1901-1966)
"He who hesitates is a damned fool." - Mae West (1892-1980)
"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater." - Gail Godwin
"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." - Henry Kissinger (1923-)
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men." - Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)
"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty." - Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime." - Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
"If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." - Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his." - General George Patton (1885-1945)
"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
"There is no sincerer love than the love of food." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"I don't even butter my bread; I consider that cooking." - Katherine Cebrian
"I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it." - Steven Wright
"Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour." - Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure." - Oliver Herford (1863-1935)
"I have read your book and much like it." - Moses Hadas (1900-1966)
"The covers of this book are too far apart." - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them." - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." - Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." - Voltaire (1694-1778)
"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before." - Mae West (1892-1980)
"I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to." - Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
"No Sane man will dance." - Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
"Hell is a half-filled auditorium." - Robert Frost (1874-1963)
"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." - Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
"Vote early and vote often." - Al Capone (1899-1947)
"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?" - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"Hell is other people." - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
"I am become death, shatterer of worlds." - Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavadgita, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion)
"Happiness is good health and a bad memory." - Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)
"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate." - Thomas Jones
"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." - Al Capone (1899-1947)
"The gods too are fond of a joke." - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting." - Gloria Leonard
"It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man." - Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell
"Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work." - Robert Orben
"The cynics are right nine times out of ten." - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"Attention to health is life greatest hindrance." - Plato (427-347 B.C.)
"Plato was a bore." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal." - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
"I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
"Hemingway was a jerk." - Harold Robbins
"How can I lose to such an idiot?" - A shout from chessmaster Aaron Nimzovich (1886-1935)
"Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday." - Woody Allen (1935-)
"I don't feel good." - The last words of Luther Burbank (1849-1926)
"Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure." - Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)
"Men have become the tools of their tools." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant." - Richard J. Ferris, president of United Airlines
"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television." - Gore Vidal
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying." - Woody Allen (1935-)
"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives." - Abba Eban (1915-)
"To sit alone with my conscience will be judgment enough for me." - Charles William Stubbs
"Sanity is a madness put to good uses." - George Santayana (1863-1952)
"Imitation is the sincerest form of television." - Fred Allen (1894-1956)
"Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." - Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)
"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research." - Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
"Why don't you write books people can read?" - Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers." - T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
"Criticism is prejudice made plausible." - Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
"It is better to be quotable than to be honest." - Tom Stoppard
"Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting." - Karl Wallenda
"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu
"A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar." - Lao-Tzu (570?-490? BC)
" The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
"Never mistake motion for action." - Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
"Hell is paved with good samaritans." - William M. Holden
"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
"Silence is argument carried out by other means." - Ernesto"Che"Guevara (1928-1967)
"Well done is better than well said." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
"The average person thinks he isn't." - Father Larry Lorenzoni
"Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd." - William Congreve (1670-1729)
"A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted." - Helen Rowland (1876-1950)
"Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century." - Perelman
"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
"There is a country is Europe where multiple-choice tests are illegal." - Sigfried Hulzer
"Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done." - Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), while working, when informed that his wife is dying
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943
"I think it would be a good idea." - Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948), when asked what he thought of Western civilization
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!" - Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" " - Will Rogers (1879-1935)
"The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy." - Von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity." - Irving Kristol
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981
"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible." - A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" - H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." - Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899
"Denial ain't just a river in Egypt." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood." - General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
"After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one." - Cato the Elder (234-149 BC, AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)
"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something." - last words of Pancho Villa (1877-1923)
"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy
"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both." - Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), "The Prince"
"Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
"The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep." - Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live
"We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees." - Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks
"Half this game is ninety percent mental." - Yogi Berra
"There is only one nature - the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole." - Bill Wulf
"There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
"I criticize by creation - not by finding fault." - Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
"Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run." - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
"He would make a lovely corpse." - Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb
"I worship the quicksand he walks in." - Art Buchwald
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned." - Paul Valery (1871-1945)
"We are not retreating - we are advanceing in another Direction." - General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964)
"#3 pencils and quadrille pads." - Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when asked what CAD tools he used to design the Cray I; he also recommended using the back side of the pages so that the lines were not so dominant.
"I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray." - Seymoure Cray (1925-1996) when was informed that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.
"Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis." - Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.
"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need." - Francois-Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."
- Mark Twain (1835-1910)
"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
It is precisely because he
does not compete that the world cannot
compete with him. -- Lao-Tzu
Writing about music is like
dancing about architecture.
I figure that if the children
are alive when I come home, I've done
my job. -- Roseanne
"my lover's charms are in a box beneath my bed. and piece by piece i'll cherish them until the end. send me an angel to love. I need to feel a little piece of heaven. send me an angel to love. I'm afraid I'll never get to heaven."
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.-- Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793
"One side will make you larger; the other side will make you smaller."
- Lewis Carrol (the caterpillar)
"Only the curious will learn, only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The Quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient."
- Eugene S. Wilson
"A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms."
- George Wald
"If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove!"
- Timothy Leary (in the memory of a trail-blazer)
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to percieve with our frail and feeble mind."
- Albert Einstein
"In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true, either is true, or becomes true."
- John Lilly
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
- Albert Einstein
"I do not take drugs. I am drugs. "
- Salvador Dali, Diary of a Genius, 1966
"Rejection of the idea that mental events have no locus by common sense, for whatever reason, proves nothing. Other fields of science are built on propositions that may seem absurd but in fact are true. (Air is heavy, has weight? Water is made up of two gases? The continents are adrift in the oceans?"
- Donald O. Hebb, 1980
"Q: Why did video drugs never became a big success ? A: Well look at the cost involved a $10.000 computer system or a few cents worth of chemical."
- Alexander T. Shulgin, Amsterdam, 18 feb 1996
"While it is undoubtly possible, with the aid of psychoactive drugs, to span both time and space, this method of overcoming these factors is unfortunately possible only psychically and not physically. Would the latter be possible, you may rest assured that I would now have taken the appropriate dosage of LSD or psilocybin so as to be transported on the flying carpet to San Francsico, for the purpose of participating in the symposium on psychoactive drugs."
- Albert Hoffmann, Ethnobotanical search or psychoactive drugs(Letter) 1979
"Remember kids, rotate your receptors!"
- Jonathan Ott, Palenque BPC,'96, second session
"Psychedelics free us from the anxiety - make us less of a terrified victim and more of a spectator."
- T McK during "Visualizing the Unspeakable" at Charlottesville, VA May, '95
"All men die, but not all men truly live!"
- William Wallace
"Nothing in life is incomprehensible if you have the proper guidance from Mary Jane."
- Kyle A. Vernon
"... casual drug users ought to be taken out and shot."
- Daryl Gates, Los Angeles police chief, speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee
"It's like that twilighty show about that zone."
- Homer J. Simpson, The Simpsons, 1995
"The prestige of the government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition Law. Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced."
- Albert Einstein - My first impression of the USA, 1921
"Something very peculiar adheres to the adventure of being human."
- Terence McKenna
"I can't even remember what drug I'm on, but I know it's acid."
- Robert F. Campbell, on VPL
"See, the Bible says 'big fish' and everybody assumes, 'a whale.' Whereas I think: 'drugs.'"
- Jeremy "Moondog" Young
"There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen"
- R. Gordon Wasson, "Seeking the magic mushrooms" Life, 1957 (rep. in Pharmacotheon, p.58)
"Because the enthusiasm necessary for successful endeavors cannot be commanded, and because the enthusiasm was already present in me as far as this problem was concerned, I decided to conduct the investigation myself"
- Albert Hofmann (concerning the isolation of psilocybin from mushrooms)
"Why am I going through life trying to make heads or tails of faceless coins?"
- Steven Zikopoulos, 1988
"The "RX" sign seen on all pharmacies, is a prayer to Horus, the Egyptian God of Healing. Chemistry comes from Khem (Egypt). Alchemy - the father of psychedelia...from Al (God) Khem (Egypt).The war on drugs is really a war against "the pharmakoi" - a ritual scapegoated group represened in classic Greek theatre. "Pharm" is the same in the Old Testament word "pharmakaia" or witch. Hence the war on drugs maintains elements of the witch-hunt, scapegoat and irrational hysteria - even mythologically inspired hysteria that will not go away. "
- Tom Lyttle - Psychedelic Monographs & Essays 1996
"Though the favorites of the gods die young, they also live eternally in the company of the gods."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"
"The world is full of fools, and he who would not see it should live alone and smash his mirror."
- Claude le Petite
"...Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic,pleasently hallucinant. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol, none of their defects..."
- Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"
"Hallucinogens: Examples of hallucinogens are mescaline, LSD, and PCP. (These drugs are also called psychedelics.) They distort the perception of reality. They affect sensation, thinking, self-awareness, and emotion. Depending on the dose and s trength of the particular drug, changes in time and space perception, delusion (false beliefs), and hallucinations (experiencing nonexisting sensations) may occur."
- Basic Military Requirements, for US military, 1995
"Rember in the dream time things are not what they seem, but what you make them seem."
- Australian Shaman, Gargoyles, 1995
"Blinking for a instant I was lost within myself on a path in a garden, which became a forest, which became a world, which became a Universe, and every time I glanced back there was nothing. "
- Zachary Moser, (on the effects of LSD), 1995
"Instead of all of this energy and effort directed at the war to end drugs, how about a little attention to drugs which will end war?"
- Albert Hofmann
"You finally have to give up experiencing it to be it..."
- Ram Dass, Doing Your Own Being
"The difference between us and Helen Keller is that she knew she was deaf and blind. "
- Tom Robbins-Foreward to "Archaic Revival" 1991
"You're god, baby. It's your reality. It all comes from you..."
- Dr. Timothy Leary, LP - You Can Be Anyone This Time Around, 1970
"everything done for the first time unleashes a demon."
- dave sim, creator of "cerebus", the 80ies
"It's not what we learn about plants that is important, but what they can teach us about themselves that is. "
- Jason Volpe
"We must beware of committing the fatally common fallacy of assuming that all we see is all there is to see."
- C.W. Leadbeater
"Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries; but he who is uninitiate and who has no part in them, never has lot of like good things once he is dead, down in the darkness and gloom. "
- Greek Hymn to Demeter, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 1914
"In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network's mind there are no limits."
- Dr. John C. Lilly, M.D.
"Chemistry is applied theology."
- attributed to August Owsley Stanley III, anecdotal
"I truly wish someone had told me that "The Excorcist" would not be a good thing to watch while tripping for the first time."
- David Burnett, 11 hrs after first LSD experience, 1995
"Ask yourself this; 'Are you a human being having a spiritual experience, or a spiritual being having a human experience?""
- Wayne Dyer, PhD
"Thanks for a nation where nobody's allowed to mind their own business."
- William S. Burroughs
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. "
- Attributed to Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)
"Unknowingly we voyage in a labyrinth, a macrodimension maze of living electrical force, cloacked by a thick layer of ordinary life. Our most serious obstacle is the uncontrollable urge to convert everything to the familiar, to reduce it all to the level of the primate brain; to reject the living, breathing reality of the totality of all possible attention."
- E.J. Gold, Life in the Labyrinth, 1986
" When you undergo a visionary experience, what you are really doing is blowing your socially conditioned, 20th century, hive mind and allowing your brain to, literally, come to its senses. "
- Steve Kubby, The Politics Of Consciousness, 1995
"The choice is always ours. Then, let me choose The longest art, the Promethean way Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan That inward fire, whose small precarious flame, Kindled or quench, creates The noble or the ignoble men we are, The worlds we live in and the very fates, Our bright or muddy star. "
- Aldous Huxley,from Orion, 1931
"One simple law of the Universe is this: take hydrogen gas and over a long period of time it makes people."
- Anonymous
"Critics have told me I've ruined the lives of 50 million young people. I can't be certain of this, since only about 10 million have ever come back to thank me."
- Timothy Leary, 1994 lecture in SF
"He who finds a thought that enables him to obtain a slightly deeper glimpse into the eternal secrets of nature has been given great grace."
- Albert Einstein
"Most [trippers] would rather change their way of looking at reality, than face the difficult and discouraging task of transforming reality itself."
- David Arora, Mushrooms Demystified, 1986
"Studying the Human Mind without Psychedelic drugs is like studying religion without a Bible."
- Terence Mckenna, 1984
"When I think of psychedelic society, what that notion means or implies to me in terms of ideology is the idea of creating a society that always lives in the light of the mystery of being. "
- McKenna, Terence, Esalen, Feb 1984
"The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements of totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large."
- Aldous Huxley, Doors of Peception,1954
"There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being."
- Albert Einstein
"Subtle, sparkling, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations... That is the radiance of thine own true nature."
- Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book Of The Dead)
"From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere... ... If you never did, you should. These things are fun and fun is good."
- Dr. Seuss, One Fish two fish red fish blue fish, 1960
"I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together."
- Beatles, I Am the Walrus
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
- Albert Einstein
"Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous."
- Terence McKenna
"Enlightenment is the conversion of religious experience to religious life."
- Steven Puerto
"The totality of oneself is comprised of experience, sensation, and desire. The demands and habits of civilization keep us focused on a narrow range of our total possibility. When a truly new experience exposes our conscious self to a broader definition of our totality, the relative importance of much of our daily activity is diminished."
- Steven Puerto
"The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child. "
- Albert Hofmann
"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large -- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."
- Aldous Huxley, "The Doors of Preception"
"It is only in the experience of the pure Void that we realize the possibility of manifesting all things. Like the Big Bang that created our universe, it is the singularity, the nothingness from which everything arises. This is the essence of Zen - and of the true psychedelic experience."
- Anonymous, 1996
"Apart from the five senses with which we perceive this reality, what evidence do we have, to prove its existence?"
- Captain Voodoo, Australia. 1996.
"A God defined is a God confined."
- Unknown
"I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries when they peeked through the curtains and discovered that this world- so manifestly real was actually a tiny stage set constructed by the mind. We discover abruptly that everything we accept as reality is just social fabrications."
- Timothy Leary, 1966
"True freedom has always been illegal."
- The Libertarian Party
"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"`What sort of people live about here?' asked Alice. `In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.' `But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. `Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' `How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. `You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.' "
- Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland
"Say Hello to my Mother and Father, Earth and Space."
- Jimi Hendrix
"What you take in by visionary experience you must give out by love and intelligence in daily life."
- Aldous Huxley
"Credo Quia Absurdum Est"
- Tertullian
"Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it."
- Horace
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is."
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 1979
"Do you have the curiosity and courage to meet the rest of whom you are?"
- Steven Puerto
"The Fates lead those who will; those who won't, they drag."
- Senecca
"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me."
- Hunter S. Thompson
"'To live alone one must be an animal or a god.' - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"2C-B is a tool which ties the mental processes directly and constructively into the physical soma."
- Alexander Shulgin
"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie."
- Aldous Huxley
"I hope to see the development of a technique of Applied Mysticism - a technique for individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the Other World in the affairs of This World"
- Albert Hofmann
"I saw the best minds of MY generation on America's Most Wanted."
- Lance Wong, ProZyme, Inc., 1992
"All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears."
- Alan C. Kay
"Mind creates matter - thus: thought condenses to become matter."
- anonymous, 1996
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
- Aldous Huxley
"He who fails to question is asking for trouble."
- Paul Aubuchon
"Magic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public."
- E.M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus, 1948
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead
"Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac"
- Dr. Timothy Leary
"The deep fascination of myths is that they speak directly to deeper levels of our nature and to the subconscious, and give the profound assurance that we are each, in essence, deathless and immortal sparks of Divinity on the long evolutionary journey into higher consciousness."
- Sir George Trevelyn
"The only absolute mystery is the Mystery of Existence. All other mysteries are relative to our inability to understand what is happening."
- Steven Puerto, 1996
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."
- Charles A. Beard
"The State is the coldest of all cold monsters."
- Nietzsche
"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
- P. J. O'Rourke
"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of the dreams."
- Willie Wonka, Willie Wonka And the Chocolate Factory
"The Catholic church is a beautiful theory for Sunday, the iboga on the contrary is the practice of everyday living. In church, they speak of God, with iboga, you live God"
- Nengue Me Ndjoung Isidore, Buitist, Magistrate in Libreville Supreme court, Gabon.
"And the Lord said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the Earth"
- Genesis 1:29
"You are what your deepest, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny."
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishads IV.4.5, Seven Spiriual Laws Of Success, 1993
"Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees."
- Schopenhauer
"But still man, in whom the spiritual degree is open, comes into that wisdom when he dies, and may also come into it by laying aside the sensations of the body, and by influx from above at the same time into the spirituals of his mind."
- Swendenborg's Wisdom of the Angel's concerning divine love and wisdom"
"The mind is its own place, and in itself it can make a heaven of a hell, and a hell of a heaven"
- Paradise Lost
"The world of matter is a relative world, an illusory one: illusory not in the sense that it does not exist, but illusory in the sense that we do not see it as it really is."
- Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters
"What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience?... There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things... The darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the Gods."
- Alan Watts, The Book
"We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution."
- Bill Hicks
"Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death. Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."
- Bill Hicks, Dangerous
"I think I might have been stupid in some respects, it if weren't for my psychedelic experiences."
- Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel laureate
"Though LSD and some kindred alkaloids have had an amazingly bad press, there seems to be no doubt of their immense and growing value."
- William G. Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous
"Scientific analysis points, curiously, toward the need for a quasi-religious transformation of contemporary cultures."
- Paul R. Ehrlich
"Psychedelic drugs have not demonstrated sufficient relevance to the health service concerns of the psychiatric profession; but this is the most interesting subject I have encountered in all my years of science. Religion, that's the field for them."
- Daniel X. Freedman M.D., president of the APA
"I have argued that every human being is born with an innate drive to experience altered states of consciousness periodically -- in particular to learn how to get away from ordinary ego-centered consciousness. I have also explained my intuition that this drive is a most important factor in our evolution, both as individuals and as a species. Nonordinary experiences are vital to us because they are expressions of our unconscious minds, and the integration of conscious and unconscious experience is the key to life, health, and spiritual development, and fullest use of our nervous systems."
- Andrew Weil, M.D.
"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. "
- T.S. Eliot
"George Orwell once observed that almost everything that goes by the name of pleasure represents a more or less successful attempt to destroy consciousness."
- Lewis H. Lapham, Harper's Magazine, July 1991
"Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do."
- Bertrand Russell
"When you reach the highest form of samadhi, you realize there are hundreds more beyond that."
- Patanjali, 400 B.C.
"It seems to me that man's inclination toward light, toward brightness, is very nearly botanical -- and I mean spiritual light. One not only needs it, one struggles for it. It seems to me that one's total experience is the drive toward light.."
- John Cheever
"To experience love, we must go inside. When you experience real love you get into a state which is beyond words. You are filled with a joy that goes beyond all emotions. True love is the love of the inner Self. "
- Swami Muktananda
"All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death. Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. "
- Bill Hicks
"The true wonder of the world is avaliable everywhere, from the minutest part of our bodies to the vast exposures of the cosmos, and in the interconnectedness of these and all things"
- Unknown
"The will within a seed determines the outer form of the plant. A crystal possesses an intellect that creates its ordered geometric shapes. Man too must will form and order, and with eye and hand try to recreate these truths in his work."
- - Victor Hammer
"I understand. You are in the grip of the ineffable inexpressible.... "
- J. Caleb Donaldson
"Dreamscapes and fantasies are all we need. The world is what we make it and I make it mine."
- Joe Mercer, writer, 1997
"Life is short and we have not too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark way with us. Oh, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind!"
- Henri F. Amiel, Source Unknown, Date Unknown
"Halluciations do not exist; such a word implies that when such things are realized by the senses, it is not real. If it presents itself to your consciousness, then it is as real as what we call "matter"."
- Michael T. Gries
"Reality is but a serotonin induced hallucination"
- chester 1995
"There are no bad drugs, just bad users."
- Dr. Andrew Weil 1997
"LSD has indeed been known to cause psychosis... In people who haven't taken it."
- Timothy Leary
