Timothy Leary Quotes

Don't criticise a hypothesis, come up with a better one.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

I'm always glad to see somebody rethink something rather than reproduce something I did.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

I have read their platform, and though I think there are some unsound places in it, I can stand upon it pretty well. But I see nothing in it both new and valuable. "What is valuable is not new, and what is new is not valuable.

We can't get any new thinking because we can't get any new thinkers.

The public use of man's reason must always be free, and it alone can cause enlightenment.

… there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

Not every obnoxious talk leads to progress, but we cannot tell which unusual idea, which seditious thought will be tomorrow's accepted truth and enshrined right ... after all, all that we take for granted, was once deemed extremely objectionable... So, not knowing where the next big step in the progress of human civilization will come from, we open our ears, our minds and our hearts to the new, the unusual and the contrarian.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

All invention and progress comes from finding a link between two ideas that have never met.

Keep up the fires of thought, and all will go well.

If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

Nobody has the right to shield any idea as so sacred it can’t be challenged. ... Almost all human progress is driven by people who stood up and said ‘I disagree’ with this idea that society at the time considered to be the most precious.’

The secret of innovation is to see what all see but think what none think

Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organisation and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity.

Possibilities play a much bigger role in thinking than most people believe. Without possibilities you cannot make progress.

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

The free intellect is the chief engine of human progress.