Terence McKenna Quotes

It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.

I think the New York theater audience is very savvy. Sometimes you get newbies who think they're going to be watching Smash onstage, and sometimes you have people who have been coming to theater for years. It's the combination of those people in an audience that makes for a pretty amazing night - their ability to give each other permission to react and enjoy, in a way that maybe they wouldn't if they weren't sitting next to each other.

I think good theaters are really important. They allow you to exist in a space with other people.

It doesn't necessarily matter if I'm onstage or not. I just find the communal experience of a rock concert, or any type of music performance, achieves a kind of transcendence that I associate with spirituality. It's the closest thing to what I think people expect church to be like. Or maybe just what I've always thought church should be. You lose yourself, and at the same time come to the realization or understanding that you're part of something bigger than yourself.

I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment - that's escape.

I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics.

I experimented with weed, Ecstasy, mushrooms and mescaline for about a year and a half.

You know, if a drug has anything going for it at all, it should be self-limiting. It should tell you when you've had enough. Acid and peyote were that way for me.

In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.

The Democrats have to know in their hearts... I think this is one of the reasons that they're constantly enraged. They have to know that their policies do not work. They do not deliver as promised. They do not create jobs. They do not make people wealthier. They do not grow economies. They do not make sure everybody has health care. Everything they promise, none of it actually happens, and the more of what they implement happens, the worse it gets for everybody. There's a reason they're losing elections.

I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do. It’s a very, very slippery slope.

I don't think people are really breaking ground and getting new fans or anything. So, I just use it more in my personal life but obviously I'm in a business where people think that Twitter matters so I'll be like, "Yes, I will tweet out this show." But it is something that me, the human, uses.

I want to be a politician. I think I understand how the system works, I think a lot of politicians are corrupt, and it's about time we put some people in there who are going to look out for the majority of the people instead of the rich people.

I think people might think, oh, I don't want to approach the big famous author because it's embarrassing, but then they think for two seconds about it and realize, this is, like, a toilet bowl reader.

I think my main concern is because I worry about demagoguery. It's real. You see the people standing up there and applauding.

The business of being happy requires making a conscious choice. People think being happy will just happen to them someday, if only they do this or that right. But it doesn't - you have to choose it. You choose happiness, you don't wait for it to choose you.

If the State does not enjoy a monopoly of violence, which then gives it the power to order people's lives and to compel them to obey decisions over which they have no control, or just limited control, then I think you have a consistently libertarian society.

I often think that those people are the happiest who know nothing at all of the world, and sitting in the little empire of the fireside, where there is no contention or cabal, think we are in a golden age of existance.

People must learn how to think well to achieve their dreams and to reach their potential.

If there were no controls on the internet - and I shudder to think at letting certain people have control of it. It is content related. Ultimately what they want to control and police is the content. They're liberals! They want to eliminate opposing points of view. They do it with political correctness, which is censorship. They do it in the Drive-By Media by simply ignoring all kinds of news that is not palatable or it conflicts with their worldview, they just ignore it and don't even cover it. It's inarguable.

I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.

You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great.

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.

I think that's a question for South Carolin and the last thing they need is people from outside the state coming in and dictating how they should resolve that issue [about flag].