Terence McKenna Quotes

The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want.

I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

Television was supposed to be a national park. Instead it has become a money machine. It's a commodity now, just like pork bellies.

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

So you're from the press? Well, your newspapers can all go to hell. You lied yesterday and you're getting ready to lie again today. Go climb down my back.

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.

This phrase, 'culture jamming,' was very much in vogue in the 1990s when these superbrands sort of emerged and started kind of projecting their names onto ever more surfaces.

If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Today enormous effort goes into convincing the American public that we're just consumers of media manipulation and sound-bites and spin doctors. That we care only about ourselves, money, and stuff. That acting out of passion and conviction doesn't make a difference. But all history shows that it does.

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.

He discusses his service in Iraq, the wounds he suffered there and he says to me in this ad, until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face, stop telling lies about my service. You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, and then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media and a TV ad, to walk into as many people as he can walk into.

They are evil people, the press, the media, they are bad people, and nobody, nobody lies like they do.

Journalists are notoriously easy to kid. All you have to do is speak to a journalist in a very serious tone of voice, and he will be certain that you are either telling the truth or a big, important lie.

Is there any other industry [than the press] in this country which seeks to presume so completely to give the customer what he does not want?

The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.

We're led by denial like lambs to slaughter, serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water.

Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why but the editorialists forget it terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.

The system happens to be Washington and the way politics works, because whatever it is, it isn't working. It defies common sense. And part and parcel of this, right in the middle of it is the media and their lying and their distorting and their favoritism and their efforts to impugn and destroy people like us who want to stop this mess that's been progressing in a deteriorating way for way too many years.

The journalist's job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through the palace guard.

Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.

American culture is no longer created by the people... A free, authentic life is no longer possible in AmericaTM today. We are being manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of our existence. Most North Americans now live designer lives-sleep, eat, sit in car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there's more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle. We ourselves have been branded.

People read the papers not in the hopes of learning something new, but in the expectation of being told what they already know. This is a form of living death. Its apotheosis is the daily poll in USA Today, which informs us what percentage of a small number of unscientifically selected people called a toll number to vote on questions that cannot possibly be responded to with a yes or no.

Let's be clear on one thing, the corporate media in America is no longer involved in journalism. They're a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it's for themselves.

There are a lot of lessons that people can take from me, that they can start to apply because I don't think that I can beat the Democrat Media Complex by myself.