"Culture is a simplification and a lie. It's the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it."
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Quote collection
Terence McKenna quotes (page 23 of 36)
705 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"No one yet understands the mysterious intelligence within plants or the implications of the idea that nature communicates in a basic chemical language that is unconscious but profound. We do not yet understand how hallucinogens transform the message in the unconscious into revelations beheld by the conscious mind."
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"Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck."
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"Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants"
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"The way you understand and investigate time is by moving inward, into metabolism. The human body is a knot in time."
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"The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history that unites the doctor, the scientist and the artist into a single notion of care-giving and creativity."
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"By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence."
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"Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes."
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"Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together."
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"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."
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"I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place."
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"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."
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"The Logos is a voice heard, in the head. And the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization for centuries, up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion."
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"Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial."
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"I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace."
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"I think what we have to do is convince people that matter is tacky."
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"LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality."
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"I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business."
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"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."
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"What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing."
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