Terence McKenna Quotes

Sexuality doesn't need to be defended or justified.

I have the freedom to say what I want to say.

Queerness is the lens that I live my life through.

Art and culture and all of these things - they really matter. They shape your individuality.

A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.

Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.

Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.

I have to respect my life, and free expression is part of my life. I can never really silence myself.

We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.

The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit - a spirit that demands self-expression .

I have in my life concentrated more on self-expression than self-denial.

Freedom of expression is a very essential condition for me to make any art. Also, it is an essential value for my life. I have to protect this right and also to fight for the possibility.

Ecstacy stripped away the user's inhibitions to self-expression. On E, lies are inefficient, and the peculiarities or weaknesses they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature.

The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for self-expression, can not by any possibility be suppressed.

Joining a sub-culture, any sub-culture, for whatever reason, is as I see it never a legitimate self-expression. It is always a result of sheep mentality; a wish to belong somewhere.

One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems...wars, nations, destructions...to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.

Even beyond sexuality, I'm generally interested in identity.

When people decide they want to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.

In every race, in every nation, and in every clime in every period of history there is always an eager-eyed group of youthful patriots who seriously set themselves to right the wrongs done to their race or nation or . . . art or self-expression.

It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you.

America is very much about individual happiness, the right to expression, self-determination. In America you do need to point to harm befalls victims before you can limit someone else's rights.

First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.

Everybody should be able to choose according to his own values and history, within a European civilization that we all belong to.

jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.