Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The “just say no” campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.”

— Terence McKenna

352. “We need a metaphor that can contain the daemon of the future that we have conjured into being.”

— Terence McKenna

353. “The western mind, because of it’s unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.”

— Terence McKenna

354. “Even a billion people is too much. There’s no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.”

— Terence McKenna

355. “And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.”

— Terence McKenna

356. “We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.”

— Terence McKenna

357. “I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.”

— Terence McKenna

358. “It’s the impossible become possible and yet remaining impossible.”

— Terence McKenna

359. “Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.”

— Terence McKenna

360. “If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.”

— Terence McKenna

361. “The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.”

— Terence McKenna

362. “History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.”

— Terence McKenna

363. “Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.”

— Terence McKenna

364. “There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.”

— Terence McKenna

365. “Time is a series of fluctuating variables.”

— Terence McKenna

366. “The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.”

— Terence McKenna

367. “It’s getting funnier because everybody’s categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don’t make sense.”

— Terence McKenna

368. “Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.”

— Terence McKenna

369. “The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.”

— Terence McKenna

370. “Cultures are virtual realities made of language.”

— Terence McKenna

371. “Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.”

— Terence McKenna

372. “It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.”

— Terence McKenna

373. “And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.”

— Terence McKenna

374. “I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.”

— Terence McKenna

375. “There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.”

— Terence McKenna

376. “The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.”

— Terence McKenna

377. “Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.”

— Terence McKenna

378. “It’s as important to be well informed in this area, if you’re going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you’re going to do that.”

— Terence McKenna

379. “At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that’s what I think it’s important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.”

— Terence McKenna

380. “This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call ‘civilization’ has been all about.”

— Terence McKenna

381. “A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.”

— Terence McKenna

382. “I’m fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you’re getting somewhere.”

— Terence McKenna

383. “In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it’s good to stick to the natural ones.”

— Terence McKenna

384. “You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.”

— Terence McKenna

385. “The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.”

— Terence McKenna

386. “Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.”

— Terence McKenna

387. “Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.”

— Terence McKenna

388. “Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don’t produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.”

— Terence McKenna

389. “In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.”

— Terence McKenna

390. “It doesn’t matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that’s frightening.”

— Terence McKenna

391. “We can’t sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.”

— Terence McKenna

392. “The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness.”

— Terence McKenna

393. “It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.”

— Terence McKenna

394. “Wife beating without alcohol is like a circus without lions.”

— Terence McKenna

395. “History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.”

— Terence McKenna

396. “The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.”

— Terence McKenna

397. “The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.”

— Terence McKenna

398. “You put two egos together and you’ve either got a conflict, which is always interesting, or better yet, a love affair.”

— Terence McKenna

399. “We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.”

— Terence McKenna

400. “A lot of people pass through the thinking I’m a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness.”

— Terence McKenna