Quote

I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.

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
Side
Sides
Forever
Cranky
Believe
Puzzled
Things
Seeming
People
Skeptical
Dumb
Choose

More quotes by Terence McKenna

Image
The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
Terence McKenna
Image
How do we fight back? By creating art.
Terence McKenna
Image
Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness
Terence McKenna
Image
I think that's the job of each of us - to show our best toys and our best tricks that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels. There is no end to this bootstrapping process. The future of the human mind and body and the future of humans together is endlessly bright.
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
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
I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed, I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.
Terence McKenna
Image
There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules
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
What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
Terence McKenna
Image
Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.
Terence McKenna
Image
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
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
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Terence McKenna
Image
My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.
Terence McKenna
Image
What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
Terence McKenna
Image
History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
Terence McKenna
Image
You're immortal as long as you live.
Terence McKenna
Image
The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
Terence McKenna
Image
People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.
Terence McKenna