Terence McKenna Quotes

At the dawn of the 21st century, a free people must now choose to shape the forces of the Information Age and the global society, to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and yes, to form a more perfect union.

I think future generations will see the invention of the Internet as having been as important as the invention of the printing press. It’s the democratizing tool of all tools. As long as no one can control the flow of information, then freedom always has a chance.

I think technology has changed America, not any one organization. Technology is taking the power away from the few. There'll be a lot more choices, and good people who are doing serious stuff will survive and there'll be a lot more voices, and that is very healthy.

Well all the big companies are really panicked by the internet thing and all that, and sales went down, although sales have gone up again in this country a bit and also the big companies, because they're so big, they need big sales really so they're not really interested.

When I was fighting communism, there was rapid development of satellite television and cell phones, and communism, to survive, would have to block all these information devices.

The Internet has made some phenomenal breakthroughs that are still only poorly understood in terms of changing people's ideas of us and them. If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.

What the Internet has done is it has decentralised power.

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.

The human family is at a critical juncture. The world is moving through a great transition. This transition is economic, as the digital revolution advances and as new powers and groups emerge.

In my world view, clearly the Internet is a huge force multiplier for Indian media because it has not crept up on us like something invisible; we've seen it all play out in the West.

The '90s were extremely diverse, almost like a laboratory of the new century. There was much experimenting around, in politics, economics, gender and family structures, and also in fashion. There was a cloud of possibilities which kept us all dizzy.

This is the conundrum of the present regimes in the Arab world. They still want to control youth; they want to be in control as they did in the 1950s and '60s. But that doesn't work anymore. Now with just a Wi-Fi link, you can understand what's happening in the world.

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.

The Internet isn't just itself a revolution - it sometimes starts them, too.

I believe, 50 years from now, when you write history, one technology that would have changed human civilization is going to be the mobile Internet.

The Internet removed geography as a significant obstacle that formerly prevented out-of-the-way places from being active players in the New Economy.

For a while, I have had this theory that we, as a society, are coming to the end of the mass production, industrial phase of the human race.

I'm lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I'm grateful to be a witness to that. It's horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense?

Today, we jump into this globalization of the economy and the internet age.

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another. We have to see today in light of the transition, say, from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry, and from industry to post-industry. We're in an epoch transition.

There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.

We have to recognize that there is a strong, fresh wind blowing, powered by these new information technologies. It will be increasingly difficult for dictators to impose their will through sheer brutality.

But how can you speed up the transformation of society in a country as large as Russia? Those sounding the moral outcry are the ones who are trying to dictate their standards from the outside. Of course, that isn't the right way to go either. One cannot impose democracy from the other side of national borders, which is something we ourselves experienced during the communist era. The West's policies toward Eastern Europe, the Helsinki process - none of that really helped us.

If things do not change, there will be nothing left to change. Either power must pass to the people or everything will perish.