Time & Perspective Quote by Ken Kesey

Kesey’s line reads like a rallying cry with a hangover. The “psychedelic revolution” had sold itself as perpetual motion: expand consciousness, shatter norms, keep the doors of perception swinging. By saying “it’s time to move on,” he’s puncturing the era’s most flattering myth - that dropping acid automatically equals progress. The blunt second sentence is the tell: “We’ve reached a certain point, but we’re not moving any more.” That’s not a celebration of arrival; it’s a diagnosis of stagnation, the moment a counterculture realizes it can calcify into costume.

The specific intent is strategic: push the scene past repetition, past the endless loop of epiphany-as-entertainment. Kesey, who helped midwife the public spectacle of LSD through the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests, is also confessing the limits of his own creation. Psychedelics can detonate perception, but they don’t automatically build institutions, policies, or durable forms of care. The subtext is impatience with a movement that mistook inner fireworks for outer change, and with a generation that began to confuse intensity with direction.

Context matters: Kesey is speaking from the late-’60s/’70s reckoning, when utopian chemistry collided with state crackdowns, bad trips, and the hard math of Vietnam, race, and class. “Next step” implies adulthood - translating visionary experience into action, ethics, and community - or admitting the revolution has become a cul-de-sac.