I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality,… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. ... And our best… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts.… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature… — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about. — Terence McKenna Copy Share Image
![“It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.” quote by Terence McKenna](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/56b/terence-mckenna-287_avenues_it-culture-invites-people-to-diminish-th_768601.jpg)
![“In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great…” quote by Terence McKenna](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/89c/terence-mckenna-287_artifacts_in-other-words-all-these-things-you-migh_1201934.jpg)
