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We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.

Terence McKenna

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Terence McKenna
Age: 53 †
Born: 1946
Born: November 16
Died: 2000
Died: April 3
Anthropologist
Ethnobotanist
Philosopher
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Terence Kemp McKenna
World
Birth
Culture
Nature
Children

More quotes by Terence McKenna

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Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.
Terence McKenna
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For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.
Terence McKenna
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As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.
Terence McKenna
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DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don't want to know about it.
Terence McKenna
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Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
Terence McKenna
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We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.
Terence McKenna
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Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
Terence McKenna
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We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.
Terence McKenna
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The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.
Terence McKenna
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By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
Terence McKenna
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I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
Terence McKenna
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Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
Terence McKenna
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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
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Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
Terence McKenna
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Let's not underrate cannabis, for cryin' out loud. Cannabis should be the glue of the community.
Terence McKenna
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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 don't know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.
Terence McKenna
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This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.
Terence McKenna
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The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation
Terence McKenna
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We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
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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