Timothy Leary Quotes

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.

Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.

The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

To survive you have to withstand the changes in the business. This business has gone through so many changes since I was young and now it is on to something else. It is all weird today, for me, because I am from the old times. You just have to keep adapting. Isn't that Darwinism? The creature that adapts to its environment survives.

A complex society is not necessarily more advanced than a simple one; it has just adapted to conditions in a more complicated way.

Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Now more than ever the world has to come together to make changes. Just because certain cultures have had long-standing traditions does not mean that in today's world they are acceptable any longer. The world and the environment are evolving and that means we must change our ways as human beings as well.

Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones.

The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.

Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

The original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.

So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

I’ve been a barbarian my whole life. I’m just a smarter barbarian now. Evolution, you know?

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

It's too bad our society isn't further along.

The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

Much guilt arises in the life of the believer from practicing the chameleon life of environmental adaptation.

Architecture is either the prophecy of an unformed society or the tomb of a finished one.