“You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.”

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

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.

Science does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer

If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.

The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.

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.

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Written with courage and passion, this is a book whose often counterintuitive clarity shakes entombed assumptions like an earthquake.

This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions….

Negative relationships are unpleasant but predictable.

Indeed, not all attacks-especially the bitter and ridiculing kind leveled at Darwin-are offered in good faith, but for practical purposes it is good policy to assume that they are.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.