Top 100 Stephen Harrod Buhner Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “When testosterone levels are low, vitamin D potentiates abnormal prostate tissue growth.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

52. “Remember Anger is energy to solve a problem. It often signals that there has been an infringement of our essential nature. Fear is a signal that there has been some change in circumstances that directly affects our survival. Sadness is letting go of something. Joy is the natural response to healthy functioning of our living selves.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

53. “In fact, other than factory farms, hospitals and doctors’ offices are the primary breeding ground of superbugs. A simple injection or a minor surgery can now, fairly routinely, lead to months in the hospital, or loss of limb, or loss of life.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

54. “The largest ecosystem known is the bacterial world that exists in the basalt layers two miles deep in the ocean, underneath and inside the basalt layers that exist another 100 to 500 feet beneath the water. This “seam” of bacterial life extends completely around the globe, a single unified ecosystem that is foundational to everything above it.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

55. “We can begin to directly interact with the meanings that flow into us from the world every minute of every day of our lives. Those meanings are directly related to what is happening in the world around us, in the communication between plants, the intelligence of animals, the functioning of Gaia.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

56. “You can use cordyceps or baikal skullcap or rhodiola infusions to stimulate the production of root tissues in plants – including the root brain – sida acuta infusions to fight bacterial infections, isatis infusions to fight viral infections, or even plants high in brassinosteroids to help a plant’s immune function.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

57. “A chronic wound in a patient with dystrophis epidermolysis bullosa was treated. The wound, despite many treatments, had never closed in 20 years. A honey-impregnated dressing closed and healed the wound in 15 weeks.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

58. “There is no linear additive process that, if all the parts are taken together, can be understood to create the total system that occurs at the moment of self-organization; it is not a quantity that comes into being. It is not predictable in its shape or subsequent behavior or its subsequent qualities. There is a nonlinear quality that comes into being at the moment of synchronicity.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

59. “By locating our consciousness in only one biological oscillator, the brain, we blinded ourselves to perceptions that have been common to human beings since they emerged from this Earth. In gaining a reductionist understanding of the world, we lost touch with the essential nature of the Earth and ourselves.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

60. “Frank Herbert once put it, “The mystery of life is not a problem to solve but a reality to experience.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

61. “In cultures that recognize the importance of this capacity, this group of people are trained to use their enhanced perceptual capacities for the benefit of the group. there would then be many more holy people among us.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

62. “Our relationship to food is a microcosm of all that we have learned about loving and being loved, about our self-worth. It is the stage upon which we reenact our childhood. If we were abused, we will abuse ourselves with food. The degree to which we are violent, abusive, self-punishing is in proportion to the degree of violence, abuse, and punishment we received. We learned how to do it by having it done to us.2.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

63. “Over time, unique invisibles, perceivable only because of the sensitivity and openness of the sensory gating in that neural network, are able to be heard and, as well, expressed through the activity of that part of the self. This is what Goethe was talking about when he said that Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

64. “The widely disseminated picture of our human exceptionalism is grounded in the assertion that we possess a unique form of intelligence due to our unique, hypertrophic brain.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

65. “Attentional amplification of sensory awareness in any sensory medium is achieved by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex that modulate activity of single neurons in sensory brain areas in the absence of any sensory stimulation and significantly increase baseline activity in the corresponding target region.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

66. “The world is not a static backdrop across which humans can move, building their suburbs where they will, the only intelligent actors on the planet. They call it the American dream, as George Carlin once put it, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

67. “In the treatment of 92 patients suffering ischemic heart disease, astragalus was more successful than nifedipine. Patients were “markedly relived” from angina pectoris. EKG test results improved 82.6 percent.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

68. “There is an embedded assumption in evolutionary theory that the human race came from some prehuman source and through natural selection is heading someplace incredible, some peak of evolution that is our ultimate destination. This belief naturally engenders the perspective that the human achievements of the past were all right for our ancestors, but in the here-and-now are obviously primitive and hopelessly old-fashioned.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

69. “But weren’t we also talking about the white pines? What do they get out of it? This is how the white pines propagate. It is a form of pollination, or rather an innovation on pollination as we usually define it.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

70. “Ironically enough, it was Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, who first warned of bacterial resistance. He noted as early as 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that numerous bacteria were already resistant to the drug he had discovered and by 1945 he warned in a New York Times interview that improper use of penicillin would inevitably lead to the development of resistant bacteria.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

71. “It makes sense: to embrace one’s sapphic feelings – to come out to oneself – is necessarily to rethink the world.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

72. “That we take plant words in through our nose or our skin or our eyes or our tongue instead of our ears does not make their language less subtle, or sophisticated, or less filled with meaning. As the soul of a human being can never be understood from its chemistry or grammar, so cannot plant purpose, intelligence, or soul. Plants are much more than the sum of their parts. And they have been talking to us a long time.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

73. “A rich sensory experience occurs during such dreaming but what you were not doing to any great extent was paying attention to the complex visual field that surrounded you as you dreamed. You were, at an unconscious level, restricting the amount of visual sensory information that flowed into your conscious mind.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

74. “I was never able to find it in the analysis of chemicals or in degree programs or in any of my schools. But sometimes I find it in the soft flutter of butterflies, in the wildness of plants growing undomesticated in a forest clearing, in the laughter and running of young children, their hair flowing in the wind, and sometimes, sometimes I find it in the words of teachers who come among us from time to time – out there, far outside these walls, in the wildness of the world.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

75. “And, in fact, a crucial additional, and almost-always-overlooked, aspect of intelligence in living systems is that they possess the capacity to innovate behavior, that is, to generate unique solutions to the environmental challenges that face them. They have the ability, as the Latin root of the word indicates, to choose.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

76. “All reality is political, but not all politics is human. GRAHAM HARMON.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

77. “Children who begin working at an early age with music have, as habit, much less pre-attentional or unconscious gating in the neural network that attends to sound. Gating, in general, develops over time and with exposure, the pre-attentional self learning to gate whatever is not important to the conscious mind. Children, by nature, have much less gating than adults – gating.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

78. “You must follow the path that opens to you and you must never stop. And it will demand that you shed your skin, over and over and over again. Your skin must be shed for that skin is not the skin of a writer; it is the skin of whatever you were before.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

79. “Gating activity outside of the normal bell-shaped curve for the population of the United States is, generally, considered to be pathological. The more widely open gating channels are, the more likely someone is to be defined as clinically abnormal and to be labeled, one way or another, as having “stimulus filtering difficulties” or “gating deficits.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

80. “Rhodiola, various species, has been found effective in the treatment of breast cancer.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

81. “When we borrow the antibiotic compounds from plants, we do better to borrow them all, not just the single solitary most powerful among them. We lose the synergy when we take out the solitary compound. But most important, we facilitate the enemy, the germ, in its ability to outwit the monochemical medicine. The polychemical synergistic mix, concentrating the powers already evolved in medicinal plants, may be our best hope for confronting drug-resistant bacteria.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

82. “Children are most susceptible to ear infections from antibiotic-resistant strains of Haemophilus influenzae, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Branhamella catarrhalis. The following kinds of remedies have been found highly effective for treating them, individually or together. These kinds of ear infections often accompany flus and colds; this will help if they do. How.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

83. “Killing off mature ecosystems results in the loss of cultural learning among the world’s ecosystem communities. Or as Albert Einstein once observed, “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

84. “To avoid this infiltration the bacteria alter the permeability of their cell membranes, often by altering the structure of the doorways that let outside substances into the cell. This makes it harder, or impossible, for antibiotics to sneak in – essentially keeping the level of the drug below that needed to affect the bacteria.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

85. “The emotional response to each tiny incoming sensory bit can tell the conscious mind if you pay attention to how you feel in the same way that musicians pay attention to sound a considerable amount about the meaning inside every particular sensory input that you experience.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

86. “Because Gram-positive bacteria have only a single cell wall, even though it’s thicker, they are, in general, much easier to treat. With Gram-negative bacteria, two cell walls have to be penetrated, not just one. In essence, the bacteria have two chances to identify and deactivate an antibacterial that is hostile to them. Even if an antibiotic gets into the periplasmic space, it usually will not kill the bacteria. It still has to penetrate the second wall.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

87. “Gain is a parameter in neural network modeling, which influences the probability that a neuron fires at a given activation level. Single cell recordings in non-human primates have shown that the likelihood of a neuron firing, given a constant sensory input, is enhanced when the stimulus dimension that is preferentially processed by the neuron is attended to.11.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

88. “Frank Ryan comments that The microbes that kill people, particularly those that kill huge numbers in sweeping epidemics, follow, in many ways, the same universal law of predator and prey. It is part of this complex gestalt that the balance is shaped by the behavior of the prey. If the prey moves – if it changes, if its numbers increase or decrease, if its ecology alters – the predator must move with it.29.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

89. “The truth is much different. Bacteria literally analyze the antibiotics that they encounter and generate responses to them. They actually remake their genome in order to alter their physical form. And this solution? It is passed on to their descendants. In essence, this is the passing on of acquired characteristics, something Lamarck insisted was possible and that neo-Darwinians have ridiculed ever since.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

90. “Other uses are: for tonifying the lungs, for shortness of breath, for frequent colds and flu infections; as a diuretic and for reduction of edema; for tonifying the blood and for blood loss, especially postpartum; for diabetes; for promoting the discharge of pus, for chronic ulcerations, including of the stomach, and for sores that have not drained or healed well.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

91. “The mycelia provide immune enhancing compounds and various neurochemicals for the plants again in exchange for nutrients that supports the development and immune function of the plant body and root brain, just exactly as they do in us when we take them as herbal medicines.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

92. “The contrast between these stories is painful but inescapable. It is not only the rainforest that is being chewed up in the industrial machine, but also human cultures 30,000 years old, ways of thinking radically different from Western approaches, plants that may never be seen again, and things that many of us will never know we lost.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

93. “Communicatory inputs from the world can occur through any of the six primary sensory modalities at any time. The important thing is to first develop the capacity to feel the deeper meanings inside any of the sensory modalities, second to seek their meanings, and third to craft congruent responses.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

94. “The neural networks responsible for sensory gating begin to process data as soon as the child is born .”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

95. “Hospitals, where large numbers of pathogenic bacteria and antibiotics come into frequent contact, give bacteria the most opportunity to develop resistance and virulence. Researchers examining the effluent streams from hospitals have found them to contain exceptionally large numbers of resistant bacteria as well as large amounts of excreted antibiotics.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

96. “In this process, any particular organism that emerges out of the self-organized matrix of the Earth system does so for particular reasons at a particular time. Those reasons will not always exist, nor will that particular species.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

97. “Once environmental inputs are perceived, all organisms possess specific capacities for processing those informational inputs. Every one of them can determine the nature of the incoming information, its potential impact on the individual organism’s health, and can decide what to do in response. They have to be able to do this in order to survive.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

98. “The prodigious production of antibacterial soaps that end up going into the water are stimulating resistance among many classes of bacteria as well.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

99. “Such self-organization always begins the same way, or as researchers Scott Camazine et al. put it, “At a critical density a pattern arises within the system.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner

100. “The foundational problem with that view is that all living organisms, it turns out, are self-organized and all of them show emergent behaviors.”

— Stephen Harrod Buhner