The Harvard Psychedelic Club Quotes

“Nisker wasn’t really in the mood for an LSD trip. After all, he was in a car and heading toward the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then Scoop started thinking to himself. Well, the guy is the “high priest of LSD.” What else can I do? When else am I going to get a chance like this? So, Nisker dropped the acid. By the time they got to the radio station Scoop was so stoned he couldn’t put two words together. But Leary sat down behind the microphone and just let out all this beautiful, flowing prose. He was his usual glib, funny self. Nisker was melting into the floor, mumbling to himself. But there was Leary, totally in charge of himself—so charismatic, so facile. What a performance!”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man,” James wrote of the alcoholic high. “To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature. . . . The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“It will enable each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral, goodbye. . . . Man is going to have to explore the infinity of inner space, to discover the terror and adventure and ecstasy that lie within us all.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“If we learned one thing from that experience it was how foolish it was to use a double-blind experiment with psychedelics. After five minutes, no one’s fooling anyone. We also learned that we all had to do the work together, with no principal investigator, because once you put that pill in your mouth, you are the principal investigator—like it or not.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“Clark suggests that saint, at least as William James defines the word, may be a better label for Timothy Leary. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James speaks of saints having “a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of an Ideal Power.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“During his life Huston came to believe that people turn to religion the way sunflowers bend in the direction of the light. We reach for God “in the way that the wings of birds point to the reality of air.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“the middle road is rarely taken once Time magazine and congressional subcommittees get into the act.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“Late in his life, Leary looked back on everything he’d said over the years and compared his level of truthfulness to the batting average of major-league baseball players. “About a third of what I’ve said is just flat out bullshit,” he told a friend. “About a third of what I’ve said is just dead wrong. But a third of what I’ve said have been home runs. So I’m batting .333, which puts me in the Hall of Fame.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“Leary was looking for another way to relate to patients, and to people in general. If someone needs psychological help, why not just go to the guy’s house, sit around the kitchen table, drink some coffee, and talk about it? Psychologists should present themselves as resources, not as doctors or authority figures. Metzner found Leary’s method very egalitarian, and very refreshing.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“The 1950s, a decade that would become synonymous with unquestioning conformity, had seen the rise of the other-directed character—all those middle-class, upwardly mobile businessmen and consumers who focused on other people’s opinions of them. By the early 1960s, however, more and more Americans were starting to follow an inner voice. There was a new kind of empathic individualism, a nonconformist mentality that would soon see full flowering in the psychedelic drug culture. One way to see this change is through film and theater—the social journey from Death of a Salesman to Easy Rider.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“Leary’s career and life would veer so far off course in the 1960s and 1970s that it’s easy to forget that he was once considered a rising star in mainstream psychology.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“Who was he? Perhaps The Trickster said it best when he quipped, “You get the Timothy Leary you deserve.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“Leary and Alpert’s ouster from Harvard had gotten international media attention, and the trickle of guests soon turned into a flood. All that publicity inspired a wave of protohippies to wash up onto their shores. They arrived broke and unkempt, begging for food, shelter, and cosmic illumination.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“It was David McClelland, his old mentor at Wesleyan, who got him the Harvard job. McClelland had moved up the academic ladder and had brought his bright young protégé along. Alpert was given a huge corner office in an old mansion that housed the Center for Personality Research, which was part of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

“it. I was the professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was the horror that I knew inside that I didn’t know.”
― Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America