Terence McKenna (Terence Kemp McKenna) Quotes
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
Quotes to Explore
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What I know about this world is that white people will take care of themselves. And what I have learned is that if you are where they are on an equal basis, they cannot take care of themselves without taking care of you.
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If I want popularity, I go to a chef's convention.
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Even complex passwords are getting easy to break if they're too short. That's because today's inexpensive computer chips have the power of supercomputers from the year 2000.
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We have been given a role to play. We have been asked to provide, to give lectures on the role of Islamic development and the way we do it here, so the people who are Muslims there would understand what the role of Islam is.
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I sometimes try to think of my life as an Iranian, and it is hard to imagine. I am grateful for the life I have had in America and all the amazing opportunities and experiences it has given me. But there is a spirit in Iranians I can see that is unbounded by geography.
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Hollywood, the business, would be just fine if someone were to destroy the Hollywood sign. The city's there is the airport - its point of entry and exit, and in some ways its identity.
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The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
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I love the ubiquitous idly-dosa combination. In fact, that was my pet name as a kid! In school, I would bug the canteen boys to get me my daily quota of idly!
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The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
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One of my earliest memories is of being about three and a half, climbing through the legs of a man who I didn't know was the famous actor, Patrick Magee.
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I was completely surrounded by religion from a young time. I was taught by my father. I engaged in discussions with him and many of these scholars who visited and came around the dining table, the lunch table, and attended many lectures with my dad. And so I learned the apprentice way.
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I grew up with a pet iguana named Willy. We had a very contentious relationship. It turns out that iguanas are not meant to live in suburban homes.
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Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.
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There's only one way to become a hitter. Go up to the plate and get mad. Get mad at yourself and mad at the pitcher.
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It's not my style to judge anybody.
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I'm waiting for them to come up with a 'Star Trek' thing so they can beam me from my house to the gigs and back.
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I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.
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I kinda went through a semi-depression. Honestly. Like, I lost myself.
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You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.
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There is a clear acknowledgement all over the world that we should not teach people to read and then to leave them without literature. For they would then relapse into a dreary and ultimately dangerous state of half-education, in which they would be easily satisfied by crude semi-pictorial approximations of the strip cartoon and by the abundant supply of degenerate literature which destroys, rather than promotes, a capacity to face the problems of the world with skill and courage.
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Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.
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I would hope that, for me, regardless of what happens in my career in the future, I always want to maintain a level of humility. I think it's so important to not lose yourself and to just understand that you're a conduit.
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I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
