Quote

People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.

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
Right
Full
Intimate
Real
Open
Dialogue
Mind
Values
Fairs
Think
Culture
Clearly
Thinking
Reality
Fair
Mitigates
People
Part
Minds
Stoned
Human
Afraid
Explore
Humans
Ought
Sexuality

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
Terence McKenna
Image
I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky.
Terence McKenna
Image
The engineers of the future will be poets.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense.
Terence McKenna
Image
In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Terence McKenna
Image
Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
Terence McKenna
Image
Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.
Terence McKenna
Image
I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.
Terence McKenna
Image
What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
Terence McKenna
Image
By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.
Terence McKenna
Image
This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.
Terence McKenna
Image
The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'
Terence McKenna
Image
The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.
Terence McKenna
Image
In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.
Terence McKenna
Image
Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
Terence McKenna
Image
LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us.
Terence McKenna
Image
I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!
Terence McKenna
Image
Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
Terence McKenna
Image
Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.
Terence McKenna
Image
Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?
Terence McKenna