Terence McKenna Quotes

The Death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.

Through all aspects of society be it art, design, the financial markets, government, technology or communications we are witnessing unprecedented global transformation - the result of which is impossible to predict.

Major organizational changes create uncertainty.

Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen from one minute to the next. Politics, religion, economics, and the institutions of family and community all have become abruptly unsure.

The world is on a bumpy journey to a new destination and the New Normal.

When I grew up, there were common patterns to people's lives. Now everybody is just making it up as they go along.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream world, because it doesn't always seem too logical how things work out.

Today, as an old order passes, the new world is more free but less stable.

Anything that keeps me off balance is vital.

The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.

When I first walked into Uber, it was very difficult because people were unsure about what was going to happen - there was a real sense of powerlessness.

What bothers me most about today is that we're getting used 2 it. ENOUGH. 2nd amendment must go. Violence has 2 stop. Culture MUST change.

For Russians in the '90s, there was that sense of not knowing what the future held at all. And coming off a long period of when people actually were robbed of the ability to plan their future - that's very much a part of totalitarian control - that exacerbated it. In this country, we are not coming off a long period like that. But I think that for a lot of Americans, as a result of globalization, as a result of the housing crisis, the future is just too uncertain. And their place in the world is too uncertain.

I've been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times.

We are the generation that came of age in an ageless society.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you'd relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays.

In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world

In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.

Isn't it fascinating how long a few minutes seem when you are completely alone with not a familiar face in sight?

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.

My generation was somewhat between things, neither free nor much supported by whatever held us in.