Terence McKenna Quotes

Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.

We need to define what culture is. Every human being lives within a culture, and culture means "To grow in." It means to literally fall, and this is exactly what I believe is happening all around us right now.

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.

Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.

Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

The transmission of our culture is as important as the transmission of wealth. Children are always watching us.

I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.

There are a lot of things that people learn and live through culture first, and politics comes afterward.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

Culture is coded wisdom

You have to convince the adults that if a child is to learn his culture, he or she will have to see his mother and father reading about it, and explaining it to him. Then it gets a legitimacy it otherwise would never have. Until then, his learning is limited.

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.

Culture represents a novelty in the world of nature, and it could have added an effective, unifying edge to the forces of natural selection.

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

In Germany representatives of the Islamic communities try to hijack children who are born here, along with the entire Islamic community, to prevent them from being influenced by the society which has taken them in. Children born here are like blank sheets on which you can write European or Islamic texts. Muslim representatives want to raise their children as if they don't even live in Europe.

Culture is another dimension.

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world

The child who has not been disciplined with love by his little world will be disciplined, generally without love, by the big world.

I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet

Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.

The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.