Activists From The United States

"Maybe it's a sick fantasy of mine, but I am really looking forward to a debate between a general and a deserter. Plus, I really want to hear President Bush have to say, "Yes, General, No, General.""

"There's a gullible side to the American people. They can be easily misled. Religion is the best device used to mislead them."

"Should such an ignorant people lead the world? How did it come to this in the first place? 82 percent of us don't even have a passport! Just a handful can speak a language other than English (and we don't even speak that very well.)"

"I think the United States, I think our government knows where he is and I don't think we're going to be capturing him or killing him any time soon."

"The majority of Americans — the ones who never elected you — are not fooled by your weapons of mass distraction."

"Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I'd like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they're here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much."

"Hey, here's a way to stop suicide bombings — give the Palestinians a bunch of missile-firing Apache helicopters and let them and the Israelis go at each other head to head. Four billion dollars a year to Israel — four billion dollars a year to the Palestinians — they can just blow each other up and leave the rest of us the hell alone."

"These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control."

"What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things... Fear is a necessary ingredient of our survival instincts."

"You survive by having your fear compass calibrated correctly. Our compass is off now because we're being told to be afraid of everything. The things that we're frightened of, or told to be frightened of, are not necessarily the things that we need to fear."

"It was the morning of April 20, 1999, and it was pretty much like any other morning in America. The Farmer did his chores. The milkman made his deliveries. The President bombed another country whose name we couldn't pronounce. Out in Fargo, North Dakota, Cary McWilliams went on his morning walk. Back in Michigan, Mrs Hughes welcomed her students for another day of school. And out in a little town in Colorado, two boys went bowling at 6 in the morning. Yes, it was a typical day in the United States of America."

"We know all those facts about Florida and what Katherine Harris did, and the private firm that took African-Americans off the voting rolls and prohibited them from voting. But I've been surprised in this first week how many average Americans were not aware of all of the trickery and deceit that took place in the year before the election to fix it for George W. Bush."

"You know he's there illegally. You know he was not elected either by the popular vote or by the vote in Florida."

"If the small businesses suck they'll be driven out of business... If they got a good restaurant, people will go there and eat. You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect? They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups. They were the Republicans in the town, they were in the Kiwanas, the Chamber of Commerce — people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing store salespersons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. Fuck all these small businesses — fuck 'em all! Bring in the chains. The small businesspeople are the rednecks that run the town and suppress the people. Fuck 'em all. That's how I feel."

"I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire, I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it? There's millions that believe in what I do. Pretty cool, huh?"

"Librarians see themselves as the guardians of the First Amendment. … You got a thousand Mother Joneses at the barricades! I love the librarians, and I am grateful for them!"

"I can't even think about this movie. I don't WANT to think about it because if I think about it I will have to face an ugly truth that has been gnawing through my head... This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed — without the use of a single gun! Not a single bullet fired! No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i.e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter! — I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre. What am I doing?"

"Many families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right. They did not deserve to die. … If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him. Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes' destination of California — these were the places that voted AGAINST Bush."

"White people scare the crap out of me... I have never been attacked by a black person, never been evicted by a black person, never had my security deposit ripped off by a black landlord, never had a black landlord... never been pulled over by a black cop, never been sold a lemon by a black car salesman, never seen a black car salesman, never had a black person deny me a bank loan, never had a black person bury my movie, and I've never heard a black person say, "We're going to eliminate ten thousand jobs here — have a nice day!""

"Well I failed to bring Roger to Flint. As we neared the end of the twentieth century, the rich were richer, the poor, poorer. And people everywhere now had a lot less lint, thanks to the lint rollers made in my hometown. It was truly the dawn of a new era."

"Drugs Are the Religion of the People — The Only Hope is Dope"

"Learning how to deal with spirit personalities takes time."

"We are dealing with the most educated generation in history But their mindslink."

"Timothy Leary really so discredited a scientific approach to studying this, because he may have started off doing interesting research, and then got into advocating use in a way that was incredibly threatening. Culturally, we reacted, and politically, it became impossible to do this sort of research. Funding agencies didn't make resources available. Regulatory agencies increased the practical hurdles for initiating this kind of research. And I think people who had interest in research of this type largely were discredited because of their interest in the research. Social, political and scientific issues that came together pushed these drugs out of the scientific marketplace."

"There was an optimism that was ungrounded. Vietnam was happening, all this real stuff was going on, and the psychedelic movement wasn't really addressing that in a real way. Timothy and that bunch sold us a false bill of goods that didn't really work."

"We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him … but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel."

"Timothy Leary's dead. No, no no no, he's outside, looking in."

"He really understood my generation. He called us "free agents in the Age of Information." What I learned from Tim didn't have anything to do with drugs, but it had everything to do with getting high. His die-hard fascination with the human brain was not all about altering it, but about using it to its fullest. And he showed us that that process-that journey-was our most important one. However we did it, as long as we did it. "You are the owner and operator of your brain," he reminded us. Tim was a huge influence on me-not just with his revolutionary ideas about human potential, but as someone who read me stories, encouraged me, took me to baseball games-you know, godfather stuff. He was the first person outside my family-who you never tend to believe while growing up-to make me believe I could do anything. He had an incredible way of making you feel special and completely supported. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his daughter in which he said that he hoped his life had achieved some sort of "epic grandeur." Tim's life wasn't "some sort of" epic grandeur. It was flat-out epic grandeur. It's easy sometimes to get lost in all the drug stuff that Tim's famous for all the "Turn on, tune in, drop out" stuff, especially in a society that loves a sound bite. But it wasn't Tim's only legacy. It was his vitality, enthusiasm, curiosity, humor, and humanity that made Tim great and those are the real ingredients of a mad scientist."

"The most dangerous man alive."

"Leary was different things to different people. He was reviled. He was revered. He was a prophet. He was a phony. He was a brilliant, innovative thinker. He was a fool. He captured the irreverent, rebellious spirit of the sixties. He was a fame-seeking, manipulative con artist. Who was he? Perhaps The Trickster said it best when he quipped, “You get the Timothy Leary you deserve.”"

"Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking, 'cause that's where he works. He knows that area of the mind and the brain, and he knows the difference between the two areas. He's a real master at getting your old wheel squeaking again. … When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew that we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it. It is still largely unexplored and uncharted. People like Leary have done the best they can to chart it sort of underground, but the government and the powers do not want this world charted, because it threatens established powers. It always has."

"Negative stereotypes about Jewish women permeated the Left and counterculture, making it even harder for radical women to identify as Jews. Naomi Weisstein recalled an incident when, while a doctoral student in Harvard's graduate psychology program, gurus Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert handed out magic mushrooms. Many students became delusional; Weisstein had a paranoid nightmare and hallucinated for a month. "We knew you would," Leary commented. "You're an uptight Jewish female who can't let herself go." Weisstein called them "sleazeballs.""

"LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it."

"But they all do sort of the same thing, and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and they remind you of the beauty of pretty simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from A to Z, that there's 24 letters in between... You turn on... tune in... and you drop out..."

"The mark of a basic shit is that he can’t mind his own business."

"While sitting in my prison cell, I was astonished to hear the local rock station play a new song by the Beatles entitled "Come Together." Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way. (I must explain that even the most good-natured persons tend to be a bit touchy about social neglect while in prison). When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit: that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else."

"John asked what he could do to help my campaign for governor. "Write a campaign song," I replied. "Okay," said John, "what's the theme?" "Our campaign slogan is 'Come together, join the party.'" "Great title," said John. He grabbed his guitar and started improvising."

"My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out."

"My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in."

"If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides telescopes are unnatural."

"Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top."

"At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos."

"In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show."

"You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind."

"We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art."

"Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky."

"Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done."

"He's basically a romantic comedian. …. He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life, and I have no intention of owning a weapon, although I was a master sharpshooter at West Point on both the Garand, the Springfield rifle and the machine-gun. I was a howitzer expert. I know how to operate these lethal gadgets but I have never had and never will have a gun around."

"A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures."

"I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life."