Terence McKenna Quotes

Language turned apes like us into civil creatures.

Before language, cavemen simply grunted, and then they used the club. Communication changed that. It's the mechanism that created civilization and prevents its own destruction.

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.

Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.

Speech is civilization itself.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

… the biography of mankind

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.

As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.

A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation.

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

I think that the development of any culture has something to do with the way people deal with the concept of illusion. The fact that the sound of my voice and the way I modulate it creates pictures in your head... in order for us to accumulate knowledge, we have to create symbolic exchanges that let ourselves be fooled temporarily by something that's not there - by a substitute for reality. When you talk about representation, you're talking about language.

We owe the origin and development of human society and, consequently, of culture and civilization, to the fact that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than when performed in isolation.

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.