Terence McKenna Quotes

It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century.

Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization.

The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake.

The spiritual sense of our place in nature... can be traced to the origins of human civilization... The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

No arts, no letters - no society.

Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.

If we can change our priorities, achieve balance and understanding in our roles as human beings in a complex world, the coming era can well be that of a richer civilization, not its end.

The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence. . . . It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.

I recycle and try to be nice to the earth. But flora and fauna have always interested me, and it is because of so many years of summer camp and growing up in DC with Rock Creek Park fairly near me, or Glover Park; I lived in Glover Park for a while and that park was in my backyard.

If we don't change, if the egoic consciousness continues, I don't believe that humanity as a species can survive, or at least human civilization can survive, for another hundred years.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilizations which they have represented, and to attempting the interpretation of whatever minds in the universe, human or divine, they believed to be real.

In fact, the 20th century I think was the most fascinating century and the whole of man civilization because so much happened.

I think civilization is going to get to a point where we suddenly become responsible, stewards of the whole evolutionary process. This requires domains of consciousness, not just levels and frequencies.

Humankind is able to create new conditions, a new reality. We are not fated to swim forever among the realities that are here now. ... Everything that is worthwhile in human civilization has not only originated from but has been inspired by dreams, by imagination.

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law and without justice. If he finds himself an individual who cannot live in society, or who pretends he has need of only his own resources do not consider him as a member of humanity; he is a savage beast or a god.

The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world - to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.

... we will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.

If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it.

The consensus is that climate change ranks along with nuclear warfare as the top two risks facing human civilization.

Ladies, you may not realize this, understand this, or even believe this, but everything else we do is ultimately for you. Men don't do anything-create art, build businesses, donate to charity, invent things, or do anything noteworthy-for any reason other than to impress women, and thus get them to have sex with us. If women didn't exist, we'd still just be naked grunting apes living in caves. In a very real way, pussy is the key to human civilization. You don't have to like it, but it's a fact; if you understand it, you understand men.