What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.

The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it's thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder.

The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.

The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.

Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.

In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.

People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.

One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.

Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you're gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.

Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.

Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.

The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic.

Ayahuasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it. I mean it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.

The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.

People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.

When you're not in love, when you don't have love, everybody you know falls in love on like the same day - even Karen the douche bag falls in love! Even retarded people in your neighborhood are getting married on their front lawn as you drive by, “What? The 'tards just got married on their lawn. That's great! I have nobody, and the 'tards just committed to each other for a lifetime of 'tardiness”.

It's amazing how dumb people can impress you with how much stupider they can be when they really assert themselves.

I don't like people that litter. If you don't throw a wrapper in the trashcan and you just toss it out on the ground I wanna take you and toss you into outer space.

Strip clubs are great places to meet interesting people you only wanna know for about 40 minutes.