Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

— Terence McKenna

Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for forms of mental behavior that we don’t understand. In the nineteenth century there was a term, melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression… but all forms of sadness, unhappiness, adaptation, were poured into this label melancholia… Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing… A book about schizophrenia [says that] the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining. Marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift in their own self-created value system. I said, that’s it! That’s it! Now I understand!

— Terence McKenna

The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.

— Terence McKenna

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of its ideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds, and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyologist metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.

— Terence McKenna

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.

— Terence McKenna

The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

— Terence McKenna

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

— Terence McKenna

The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer

— Terence McKenna

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

— Terence McKenna

The questions of God – meaning in Milton’s phrase “The god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven” – I don’t think psychedelics can address that definitively, but there is another god, a goddess, the goddess of biology, the goddess of the coherent animal human world, the world of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the planet. In short, our world! The world that we were born into, that we evolved into, and that we came from. That world, the psychedelics want to connect us up to… Our individuality, as people and as a species, is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here, and to my mind that’s the religious impulse. It’s not a laundry list of moral dos and don’ts, or a set of dietary prescriptions or practices: it’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for our fellow human beings and for the earth you're walking around on, and because these psychedelics come out of that plant vegetable matrix they are the way back into it.

— Terence McKenna