Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.

— Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna Quotes

Authority will lead you into ruin.

— Terence McKenna

A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined, and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself.

— Terence McKenna

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

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

I think there’s a very strong Calvinistic bias against a free lunch. The idea that you could achieve a spiritual insight without suffering, soul-searching, flagellation, and that sort of thing, is abhorrent to people because they believe that the vision of these higher dimensions should be vouchsafed to the good, and probably to them only after death. It is alarming to people to think that they could take a substance like psilocybin or DMT and have these kinds of experiences.

— Terence McKenna

Wife beating without alcohol is like a circus without lions.

— Terence McKenna

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

— Terence McKenna

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

We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.

— Terence McKenna

Take it easy man, but take it.

— Terence McKenna

I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It’s a strange kind of protective denial.

— Terence McKenna

Worry is praying to the devil.

— Terence McKenna

The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious.

— Terence McKenna

If nature represents a principle of economy, then culture surely must exemplify the principle of innovation through excess.

— Terence McKenna

The only spirit that ever gave me a name was St. Tammany whom reassured me of my future success early on and kept saying the name Matthew Edward Hall whom i predict will be a prophet or future savior of some sort. I’ve confirmed St. Tammany to be Tamanend, the only Native American Saint.

— Terence McKenna

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.

— Terence McKenna

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

We will amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction.

— Terence McKenna

What I’ve done here this evening is just create a string of metaphors to try and pique your interest. Not once did I do justice to the truth of the situation or the depth of the psychedelic experience, because it cannot be told. It cannot be told. My technique is to tell the wildest, strangest story I can think of, claim that’s the psychedelic experience, and leave it at that. But you should all know that the journey begins where the words stop.

— Terence McKenna

When you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetables, the psychedelic plants that have stabilized the sane societies of this world for millennia, the first message that comes to you is: You are a divine being. You matter. You count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

— Terence McKenna
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