Terence McKenna (Terence Kemp McKenna) Quotes
It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm a lot more introspective than one would believe.
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To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
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I'm an Oscar nominee. I love saying that. Whatever happens, I'm going to sing that 'I'm an Oscar nominee' part.
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I looked up to my father when I was 7 and 8. I believed it was my calling to be in the big leagues. I'd been raised by a family that always told me I could do anything I wanted.
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The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.
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Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.
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A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
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The moment you enlist in the army of God, you personally become a target. You need to remember that if you're living for and walking with Jesus Christ, the powers of darkness are aligned against you.
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The music led to the acting. But movies aren't something you can just will yourself into. Someone has to choose you, and you have to be quite fortunate to be chosen.
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I understand how the economy actually works.
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Never dress down for the poor. They won't respect you for it. They want their First Lady to look like a million dollars.
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If there's any definition to being perfect, you're perfect at being yourself.
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Elections have to have at least a little meaning. Obama ran on income tax hikes for the wealthy. People knew they were voting for that. They 'want' that. And it's good policy.
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I think Cate Blanchett is fabulous - she just shines in everything she does - and I'm a big Susan Sarandon fan.
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A pig's trotter is a fantastic thing. The first night of my honeymoon in Paris, my wife fell asleep in her steak tartare, so my trotter kept me company.
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Good music makes you feel something.
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Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress-one might say, the only lever of progress.
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We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.
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One must be something to be able to do something.
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Measuring success in cultural diplomacy - the use of education, creative expression in any form, or people-to-people exchange to increase understanding across regions, cultures, or peoples - is challenging. How does one quantify changes in attitude, abandoning stereotypes, or feeling empathy as a result of a performance, a film, a book?
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Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.
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It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
