Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.”

— Terence McKenna

252. “Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you’re practicing psychotherapy.”

— Terence McKenna

253. “One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.”

— Terence McKenna

254. “Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.”

— Terence McKenna

255. “The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.”

— Terence McKenna

256. “Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.”

— Terence McKenna

257. “Psychedelic telepathy is you ‘see’ what I mean.”

— Terence McKenna

258. “This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you’re taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there’s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.”

— Terence McKenna

259. “The data stream has been corrupted, return to first principles.”

— Terence McKenna

260. “We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don’t look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.”

— Terence McKenna

261. “What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.”

— Terence McKenna

262. “The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.”

— Terence McKenna

263. “Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”

— Terence McKenna

264. “The momentum now is inevitable. Now it’s about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.”

— Terence McKenna

265. “The obligation on us is to communicate the truth so that it is understood. The belief will take care of itself.”

— Terence McKenna

266. “We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it’s a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.”

— Terence McKenna

267. “You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.”

— Terence McKenna

268. “I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That’s not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.”

— Terence McKenna

269. “There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.”

— Terence McKenna

270. “The content of the dialogue with ‘the Other’ is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, ‘the body is the placenta of the soul’”

— Terence McKenna

271. “Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”

— Terence McKenna

272. “What we need to change is our minds, that’s the part that’s doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.”

— Terence McKenna

273. “We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.”

— Terence McKenna

274. “We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.”

— Terence McKenna

275. “I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own.”

— Terence McKenna

276. “Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: ‘The galaxy lies waiting.’”

— Terence McKenna

277. “Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.”

— Terence McKenna

278. “A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing. It’s changed before, but not for a long time in our lives, not since before our lives. But now it’s changing, and there are many many possibilities.”

— Terence McKenna

279. “Inside the boundaries of the old paradigm there’s no hope, there’s no way out of the box of capitalism, monogamy, consumer fetishism, egoism, money worship, no way out. No way. No way out!”

— Terence McKenna

280. “That’s what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you’re dealing with.”

— Terence McKenna

281. “All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it’s very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you’re lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.”

— Terence McKenna

282. “If you play the cultural game, it’s like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded.”

— Terence McKenna

283. “The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.”

— Terence McKenna

284. “Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.”

— Terence McKenna

285. “Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.”

— Terence McKenna

286. “Nature is actually the goal at the end of history.”

— Terence McKenna

287. “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

288. “For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.”

— Terence McKenna

289. “History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.”

— Terence McKenna

290. “The history of man that you don’t know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don’t know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.”

— Terence McKenna

291. “It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.”

— Terence McKenna

292. “History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.”

— Terence McKenna

293. “I don’t believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.”

— Terence McKenna

294. “I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.”

— Terence McKenna

295. “I think what’s really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.”

— Terence McKenna

296. “This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.”

— Terence McKenna

297. “The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.”

— Terence McKenna

298. “Culture is another dimension.”

— Terence McKenna

299. “Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism.”

— Terence McKenna

300. “I think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don’t think we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium.”

— Terence McKenna