Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.”

— Terence McKenna

452. “It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.”

— Terence McKenna

453. “It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.”

— Terence McKenna

454. “History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.”

— Terence McKenna

455. “Things are pretty strange in this world and people do it many ways and you are just an atom in a galaxy of possibilities and your opinions and your science and ‘What I think’ and all that, is just so much noise in a very complex and busy world. And its that same humbling perception that comes out of psychedelics. It just shows you, you’re very parochial.”

— Terence McKenna

456. “What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.”

— Terence McKenna

457. “There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.”

— Terence McKenna

458. “Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.”

— Terence McKenna

459. “What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.”

— Terence McKenna

460. “Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.”

— Terence McKenna

461. “To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.”

— Terence McKenna

462. “What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It’s a kind of tuneless singing.”

— Terence McKenna

463. “I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.”

— Terence McKenna

464. “I can’t think of a society on Earth where people don’t take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.”

— Terence McKenna

465. “National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.”

— Terence McKenna

466. “It’s as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.”

— Terence McKenna

467. “I’m not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I’m an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.”

— Terence McKenna

468. “The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.”

— Terence McKenna

469. “Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?”

— Terence McKenna

470. “I would argue that it’s almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you’re doing heroin you’re responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you’re mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?”

— Terence McKenna

471. “Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.”

— Terence McKenna

472. “I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It’s a strange kind of protective denial.”

— Terence McKenna

473. “Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we’re working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.”

— Terence McKenna

474. “Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.”

— Terence McKenna

475. “The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.”

— Terence McKenna

476. “Because this is the world that science built, with the henchmen of capitalism and Christianity.”

— Terence McKenna

477. “The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.”

— Terence McKenna

478. “But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.”

— Terence McKenna

479. “Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I’ve been telling people recently is that until there’s animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.”

— Terence McKenna

480. “One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?”

— Terence McKenna

481. “What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.”

— Terence McKenna

482. “It’s the only hallucinogen I know, where if it’s made right, the next day, or the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn’t done it.”

— Terence McKenna

483. “It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.”

— Terence McKenna

484. “I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.”

— Terence McKenna

485. “A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself.”

— Terence McKenna

486. “We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.”

— Terence McKenna

487. “We will amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction.”

— Terence McKenna

488. “Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.”

— Terence McKenna

489. “Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.”

— Terence McKenna

490. “Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!”

— Terence McKenna

491. “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

492. “I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn’t for that.”

— Terence McKenna

493. “Culture as we’re practicing it is causing a lot of pain.”

— Terence McKenna

494. “There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens’ use of drugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism.”

— Terence McKenna

495. “Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.”

— Terence McKenna

496. “Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.”

— Terence McKenna

497. “Only responsible human beings can exist in an anarchistic society.”

— Terence McKenna

498. “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

499. “Obviously, it’s some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.”

— Terence McKenna

500. “What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.”

— Terence McKenna