Culture Quote by 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

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Culture Currency Fool Lying Navigate People Simplification Smart Smart people World

More by Terence McKenna

History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.

Terence McKenna

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We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as…

Terence McKenna

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

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We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

Terence McKenna

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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

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What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

Terence McKenna

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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

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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

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Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.

Terence McKenna

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This is the message of your life and my life - it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze…

Terence McKenna

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of…

Terence McKenna

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

Terence McKenna

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More Culture quotes

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of…

Octavio Paz

Philosopher is a dictator who modifies accepted standards with his thoughts.

Ilkin Santak

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A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of…

Daniel Pinchbeck

In the hearing world, I'm constantly having to lip-read and trying to understand what's going on. Sign language is so beautiful. It gives you…

Rose Ayling-Ellis

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I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I've long been interested…

Laura van den Berg

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Our times demand the declaration of the world's resources as the common heritage of all people.

Jacque Fresco

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The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa