Quote

Language betrays, in order to mean.

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
Betray
Language
Order
Mean
Betrays

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.
Terence McKenna
Image
And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.
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
It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.
Terence McKenna
Image
You put two egos together and you've either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.
Terence McKenna
Image
What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.
Terence McKenna
Image
When we really understand time travel we may find out it's as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.
Terence McKenna
Image
The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That's why it's not important that yogas' claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.
Terence McKenna
Image
No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.
Terence McKenna
Image
Don't diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.
Terence McKenna
Image
That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.
Terence McKenna
Image
Culture as we're practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
Terence McKenna
Image
An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.
Terence McKenna
Image
Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
Terence McKenna
Image
Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.
Terence McKenna
Image
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 grasp of the situation.
Terence McKenna
Image
The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.
Terence McKenna
Image
There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.
Terence McKenna
Image
In shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's as important to be well informed in this area, if you're going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you're going to do that.
Terence McKenna