Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “What is needed, is an awakening.”

— Terence McKenna

52. “The only evil that associates itself with mushrooms is taking too little.”

— Terence McKenna

53. “There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.”

— Terence McKenna

54. “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

55. “You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.”

— Terence McKenna

56. “Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.”

— Terence McKenna

57. “The felt presence of immediate experience – this is all you know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor.”

— Terence McKenna

58. “I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there.”

— Terence McKenna

59. “The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.”

— Terence McKenna

60. “The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.”

— Terence McKenna

61. “Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It’s a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.”

— Terence McKenna

62. “Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”

— Terence McKenna

63. “We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don’t need behind.”

— Terence McKenna

64. “For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.”

— Terence McKenna

65. “How do we fight back? By creating art.”

— Terence McKenna

66. “Culture is your operating system.”

— Terence McKenna

67. “Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.”

— Terence McKenna

68. “All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.”

— Terence McKenna

69. “Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

— Terence McKenna

70. “Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.”

— Terence McKenna

71. “Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.”

— Terence McKenna

72. “Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.”

— Terence McKenna

73. “The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.”

— Terence McKenna

74. “Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening.”

— Terence McKenna

75. “The engineers of the future will be poets.”

— Terence McKenna

76. “A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.”

— Terence McKenna

77. “Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.”

— Terence McKenna

78. “My idea of enlightenment is when ego and Tao are fused, and Tao is perceived as ego. Then everything happens with complete appropriateness.”

— Terence McKenna

79. “So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.”

— Terence McKenna

80. “It’s no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.”

— Terence McKenna

81. “What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.”

— Terence McKenna

82. “Don’t diddle the dose. Once you have done your homework, go for it.”

— Terence McKenna

83. “Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.”

— Terence McKenna

84. “I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.”

— Terence McKenna

85. “Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most.”

— Terence McKenna

86. “Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.”

— Terence McKenna

87. “The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?”

— Terence McKenna

88. “We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.”

— Terence McKenna

89. “Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

— Terence McKenna

90. “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

91. “We’re not dropping out here, we’re infiltrating and taking over.”

— Terence McKenna

92. “Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.”

— Terence McKenna

93. “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

— Terence McKenna

94. “This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.”

— Terence McKenna

95. “Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet.”

— Terence McKenna

96. “Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.”

— Terence McKenna

97. “The question is being asked, ‘Are we alone?’ And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we’re not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?”

— Terence McKenna

98. “And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.”

— Terence McKenna

99. “Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.”

— Terence McKenna

100. “Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.”

— Terence McKenna