Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “It is the people who are ‘far out’ who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.”

— Terence McKenna

302. “Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.”

— Terence McKenna

303. “The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.”

— Terence McKenna

304. “There’s only the integrity of doing and having done.”

— Terence McKenna

305. “And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.”

— Terence McKenna

306. “The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it’s just a gloss. I mean, they’re small, and they have the archetype. They’re more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.”

— Terence McKenna

307. “When we really understand time travel we may find out it’s as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.”

— Terence McKenna

308. “I spend as many hours a day as I possibly can smoking cannabis.”

— Terence McKenna

309. “Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.”

— Terence McKenna

310. “I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.”

— Terence McKenna

311. “Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I’m noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.”

— Terence McKenna

312. “The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.”

— Terence McKenna

313. “What you call man is time.”

— Terence McKenna

314. “Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there.”

— Terence McKenna

315. “My voice speaking is a monkey’s mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises.”

— Terence McKenna

316. “In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.”

— Terence McKenna

317. “Take it easy man, but take it.”

— Terence McKenna

318. “Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It’s the last nursery, and most people never leave it.”

— Terence McKenna

319. “We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”

— Terence McKenna

320. “If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way, ‘When the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.’”

— Terence McKenna

321. “Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.”

— Terence McKenna

322. “You know what, I’m stoned, and I’m proud.”

— Terence McKenna

323. “Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.”

— Terence McKenna

324. “I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.”

— Terence McKenna

325. “I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.”

— Terence McKenna

326. “The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.”

— Terence McKenna

327. “I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.”

— Terence McKenna

328. “It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.”

— Terence McKenna

329. “The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.”

— Terence McKenna

330. “Human history is a Gaian dream.”

— Terence McKenna

331. “A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.”

— Terence McKenna

332. “We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.”

— Terence McKenna

333. “The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.”

— Terence McKenna

334. “The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.”

— Terence McKenna

335. “Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.”

— Terence McKenna

336. “People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.”

— Terence McKenna

337. “What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.”

— Terence McKenna

338. “It’s our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It’s not our political systems.”

— Terence McKenna

339. “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

340. “What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.”

— Terence McKenna

341. “Memory training is great psychedelic training.”

— Terence McKenna

342. “It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.”

— Terence McKenna

343. “We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”

— Terence McKenna

344. “The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.”

— Terence McKenna

345. “I’m as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.”

— Terence McKenna

346. “One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.”

— Terence McKenna

347. “We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.”

— Terence McKenna

348. “The discs which haunt the skies of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.”

— Terence McKenna

349. “We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.”

— Terence McKenna

350. “Mystery is alive in the moment, in the here and now. It just simply lies on the other side of a barrier of courage.”

— Terence McKenna