Terence McKenna Quotes

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

It is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be in the grasp of superficially educated people.

Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.

Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

I definitely do see language serving its users, and when it no longer serves them we need to look for new words.

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

Language does not leave fossils, at least not until it has become written.