Top 500 Terence McKenna Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.”

— Terence McKenna

402. “Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.”

— Terence McKenna

403. “We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.”

— Terence McKenna

404. “You’re immortal as long as you live.”

— Terence McKenna

405. “Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn’t even your trip. They don’t even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.”

— Terence McKenna

406. “We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.”

— Terence McKenna

407. “What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.”

— Terence McKenna

408. “I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I’m forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.”

— Terence McKenna

409. “Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.”

— Terence McKenna

410. “The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.”

— Terence McKenna

411. “We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.”

— Terence McKenna

412. “History is the siren song of the soul.”

— Terence McKenna

413. “The twentieth-century linguistic revolution,” says Boston University anthropologist Misia Landau, “is the recognition that language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language.”

— Terence McKenna

414. “I discovered early in life a stunning truth that’s made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it’s that people are very easy to love.”

— Terence McKenna

415. “We’re not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.”

— Terence McKenna

416. “People are concrescences of ambiguity.”

— Terence McKenna

417. “This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.”

— Terence McKenna

418. “What we drug people have, that you don’t, is repeatability.”

— Terence McKenna

419. “If you cross an onion with a UFO, what you get is a flying saucer that brings tears to your eyes.”

— Terence McKenna

420. “We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”

— Terence McKenna

421. “The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.”

— Terence McKenna

422. “And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.”

— Terence McKenna

423. “Just because you have a nut theory it doesn’t mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there’s a limited pool there that we’re all after.”

— Terence McKenna

424. “One of the things that people don’t do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.”

— Terence McKenna

425. “Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.”

— Terence McKenna

426. “In a sense, what’s happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.”

— Terence McKenna

427. “We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.”

— Terence McKenna

428. “Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.”

— Terence McKenna

429. “What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it’s accessible.”

— Terence McKenna

430. “You don’t go on bended-knee to petition the official culture for your rights. You have to take them.”

— Terence McKenna

431. “These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.”

— Terence McKenna

432. “Cyberspace is the human transition into a mathematical super space where we as a collectivity become optionally a single point of view.”

— Terence McKenna

433. “I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.”

— Terence McKenna

434. “I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.”

— Terence McKenna

435. “Our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas.”

— Terence McKenna

436. “And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.”

— Terence McKenna

437. “History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.”

— Terence McKenna

438. “The party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand; but who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party?”

— Terence McKenna

439. “Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.”

— Terence McKenna

440. “There’s something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.”

— Terence McKenna

441. “The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.”

— Terence McKenna

442. “I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.”

— Terence McKenna

443. “Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.”

— Terence McKenna

444. “For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.”

— Terence McKenna

445. “It’s a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.”

— Terence McKenna

446. “We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.”

— Terence McKenna

447. “Jean Baker Miller pointed out that the so-called need to control and dominate others is psychologically a function, not of a feeling of power, but of a feeling of powerlessness. Distinguishing between “power for oneself and power over others,” she writes: “In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.”

— Terence McKenna

448. “To me, the most amazing the most amazing transformation in my lifetime is not the revolution of the Sixties but the counter revolution of the Seventies, where they managed to put the cuckoo clock back together again.”

— Terence McKenna

449. “I’m not an advocate of drugs. I’m an advocate of psychedelics.”

— Terence McKenna

450. “By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.”

— Terence McKenna