Quote

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

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
Attends
Decadence
Freedom

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
This is a very central part of the psychedelic attitude toward the world, to entertain all possibilities but to never commit to belief. Belief always being seen as a kind of trap, because if you belief something you are forever precluded from believing its opposite.
Terence McKenna
Image
The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.
Terence McKenna
Image
We must look to the native healers all over the world and study their methods... Their methods are chemical and personal. It's a combination of care, attention, intention and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and recast in other forms.
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
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
Terence McKenna
Image
Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.
Terence McKenna
Image
The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
Terence McKenna
Image
The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Terence McKenna
Image
Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
Terence McKenna
Image
It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.
Terence McKenna
Image
It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.
Terence McKenna
Image
One of the things that people don't do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
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
Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
Terence McKenna
Image
The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.
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
Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.
Terence McKenna
Image
The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.
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
Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
Terence McKenna