Terence McKenna Quotes

People b'lief the world is built so an tellin em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours.

It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

We need a new concept of reality and a new set of values for things to change in a positive direction. LSD could help to generate such a new concept.

What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly people who can make laws and have the power to enforce them. I'm often amazed at the conversations black people have about themselves. They ought to be having these conversations about white people. It's white people who are flawed and at fault.

There are good, humanitarian people everywhere - occasionally even in the Church.

If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

People's belief in their own local reality-tunnels keep us all far stupider than we ought to be.

The most transformative experiences people have - bliss, devotion, self transcendence - are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict.

We shouldn't even need the word 'atheism'. If people didn't invent ridiculous imaginary gods, rational people wouldn't have to deny them.

A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.

What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.

Agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat.

I have a pretty good sense of when to express misgivings. And white critics are just as capable of pointing those things out and noticing them as people of color.

Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.

The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawns until they fell down and saw God.

They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness.

The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that helps him get through the day. This is why people of different religions can generally live in peace. At some level, we all suspect that other people don't believe their own religion any more than we believe ours.

You can’t have people curating culture in this way when we need to see things in order to reform from them.

Mark Twain is a universe, and he is also a kind of American authority figure. He can say things to America that other people can't say, in a way that can truly be heard.

Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.

I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.