Terence McKenna Quotes

Honestly, it’s so easy to get what you want from people if they think you’re a psycho.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

I've always thought I could use my brain and my heart to jockey everyone around to the good. But life is not jockeyable. When you try, you make people infinitely crazier than they already were, including or especially yourself.

Decent people are so easy to manipulate, Potter.

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

The best way to compel weak-minded people to adopt our opinion, is to frighten them from all others, by magnifying their danger.

There is undoubtedly a difference between people who manipulate other people and people who create things.

You feign guilt in order to justify yourself.

In some extremely important ways, people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expect them to behave.

One of the things that can be helpful in terms of an explanation is to look at the ways in which cults are similar to abusive relationships. Nobody seeks out an abusive partner, but so many people stay in these relationships longer than they should - they make excuses, they ignore red flags, and they allow themselves to be emotionally manipulated.

I'm always shocked by what people react to.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

The psychological peer pressure that the left has employed - and deployed, actually - on young people has been overwhelmingly successful. It has created droves and droves of people that vote against what they know is right, vote against their own self-interest, in exchange for feeling good about themselves and also being immune from criticism.

The attitude of other people affects each of us and the attitude of each of us has the capacity to affect all of us.

The most dangerous of all flattery is the inferiority of those about us.

[Revealing character] can't be done by pushing the person into position or arranging his head at a certain angle. It must be accomplished by provoking the victim, amusing him with jokes, lulling him with silence, or asking impertinent questions which his best friend would be afraid to voice.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals for the most part governed by the impulse of passion. This is a truth well understood by our adversaries who have practised upon it with no small benefit to their cause. For at the very moment they are eulogizing the reason of men & professing to appeal only to that faculty, they are courting the strongest & most active passion of the human heart - VANITY!

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

People who want to manipulate you will fear your joy, because it's not easily controlled.

Influencing people is dangerous. Their acts and thoughts become your illegitimate children. You can't get away from them and Heaven knows what they mayn't grow up into.

Anyone would be able to be played by someone like him [Donald Trump], that's what he did, he played people.

Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

There's no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas. There are only your own ideas and other people's. If you want someone to like your idea, tell him he said it first last week and you just remembered it.

Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us.

I am very much a people person. If I am in a beautiful place but I don't like the people, I am miserable.