Terence McKenna Quotes

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

I don't think there is such a thing as as a real prophet. You can never predict the future. We know why now, of course; chaos theory, which I got very interested in, shows you can never predict the future.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

Zippy accepts chaos as what it is, which is the real order of everything.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead

'Entropy' broadly means tending towards chaos constantly.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.' And?' Chaos theory throws it right out the window.

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

You can't predict anything. How can you be certain about anything when everything is chaos and we're not in control?