Ken Kesey Quotes

Since we don't know where we're going, we have to stick together in case someone gets there.

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.

If you've got love in your heart, whatever you do from that moment out is likely to be right. If you've got that one true note ringing inside you, then whatever you do is going to be OK.

You don't lead by pointing and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.

You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.

All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

You've got to get out and pray to the sky to appreciate the sunshine; otherwise you're just a lizard standing there with the sun shining on you.

People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

It is just as much an offense to take offense as it is to give offense.

Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.

Loved. You can't use it in the past tense. Death does not stop that love at all.

I had to keep on acting deaf if i wanted to hear at all.

When you love someone it is forever, or it was never really love at all.

It's time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. We've reached a certain point, but we're not moving any more.

Always stay in your own movie.

There've been a lot more people hurt on astro-turf than grass.

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

When you're around the whole Dead scene, they're there as a tribal thing; they're there as part of a rendezvous and a pow-wow.

I've enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.

There are going to be times when we can't wait for somebody. Now, you're either on the bus or off the bus.

The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.

You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?

Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.

The trouble with super heroes is what to do between phone booths.

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?

When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it.

Ritual is necessary for us to know anything.

To hell with facts! We need stories.

I've found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that have to be talked about.

The world news might not be therapeutic.

The Grateful Dead are our religion. This is a religion that doesn't pay homage to the God that all the other religions pay homage to.

There's no disgrace in failing, lad, Though friends and foes deride; In fact, a failure's not so bad As never having tried.

I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.

Fascism wants Baptism coast to coast.

The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon

People don't want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in.

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.

See with your ears and hear with your eyes.

Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me, but rarely did we look at one another.

Living is the purpose of life, And meaning can be found therein. I finds thou. Thou becomes it. And it begins again.

But I tried, didn't I? Goddamnit, at least I did that.

There's a lot of people who don't understand the circle crops in England. Pure enigma.

Take what you can use and let the rest go by.

The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery.

There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure what.