Quote

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

Terence McKenna

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
People
Teeth
Standing
Civilization
Situation
Kicking
Happy
Billion
Culture
Billions
Trying
Shoulders
Make
Pleasant

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.
Terence McKenna
Image
Memory training is great psychedelic training.
Terence McKenna
Image
To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.
Terence McKenna
Image
The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
Terence McKenna
Image
I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.
Terence McKenna
Image
For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Terence McKenna
Image
The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
Terence McKenna
Image
No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
Terence McKenna
Image
It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
Terence McKenna
Image
History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
Terence McKenna
Image
Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
Terence McKenna
Image
Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.
Terence McKenna
Image
You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.
Terence McKenna
Image
Science is the special province of the ego. And magic and art are the special province of something else. I could name it, but I won't. It prefers to be unnamed
Terence McKenna
Image
Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.
Terence McKenna
Image
You will ride the Tao toward the concrescence and will be able to live in the light of its anticipation.
Terence McKenna
Image
Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.
Terence McKenna
Image
The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
Terence McKenna