Terence McKenna Quotes

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.

Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.

I had a terrible fear of not being normal - of not seeming normal. So I went to the library and read every psychology book I could find. Anything about how normal people behave.

When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome.

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.

There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, 'Yeah, that's who I am.'

I grew up in Georgia, and my mom would tell me how to perform and act. So I learned to repress a lot of myself so that other people would feel comfortable.

But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

We were born in this society, we grew up in this society. And we learn to be like everyone else, playing nonsense all the time.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

This hetero - normative behavior and herd mentality is dangerous. It's okay to be different.

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals - for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

Men walk almost always in the paths trodden by others, proceeding in their actions by imitation.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

New customs, Though they be never so ridiculous (Nay, let em be unmanly), yet are followed.

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists.

A lot of what we say and do are regurgitated things that have to do with what we think we're supposed to be saying and doing.

The majority cannot reason; it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth.