Quote

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

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
Cognitive
Glory
Activity
Animal
Human
Humans

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.
Terence McKenna
Image
Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
Terence McKenna
Image
I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.
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
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
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
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.
Terence McKenna
Image
In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.
Terence McKenna
Image
The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.
Terence McKenna
Image
Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.
Terence McKenna
Image
We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.
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
Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
Terence McKenna
Image
Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.
Terence McKenna
Image
A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.
Terence McKenna
Image
The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.
Terence McKenna
Image
And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.
Terence McKenna
Image
There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
Terence McKenna
Image
Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
Terence McKenna
Image
If you actually look at the etymology of the word 'hallucination', what it's come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That's the meaning of 'hallucination', to wander in the mind.
Terence McKenna