Culture Quotes by Terence McKenna

Culture is another dimension.

— Terence McKenna

Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.

— Terence McKenna

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

— Terence McKenna

Culture is your operating system.

— Terence McKenna

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

— Terence McKenna

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

— Terence McKenna

Liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take responsibility for what you think and what you do.

— Terence McKenna

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.

— Terence McKenna

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

— Terence McKenna

We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.

— Terence McKenna

In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of…

— Terence McKenna

And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying…

— Terence McKenna

Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when…

— Terence McKenna

Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.

— Terence McKenna

Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental…

— Terence McKenna

Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.

— Terence McKenna

I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.

— Terence McKenna

I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don't think we can carry our cultures…

— Terence McKenna

This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that…

— Terence McKenna

Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent…

— Terence McKenna

There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the…

— Terence McKenna

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts…

— Terence McKenna

Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that…

— Terence McKenna

The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people…

— Terence McKenna

I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a…

— Terence McKenna

It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet.…

— Terence McKenna

One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You…

— Terence McKenna

We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition…

— Terence McKenna

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human…

— Terence McKenna

And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an…

— Terence McKenna

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus…

— Terence McKenna

It is now very clear that techniques of machine-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds…

— Terence McKenna

I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language…

— Terence McKenna

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic…

— Terence McKenna

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted…

— Terence McKenna

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's…

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison…

— Terence McKenna

What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is…

— Terence McKenna

Perhaps, you know, new laws, new domains of potential openness are occurring as the universe ages, and complexity previously disallowed is now…

— Terence McKenna