“I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fenc...” — Terence McKenna Quote

“I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I *loathe* Science and am always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love Reason and I'm perfectly aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence. I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit from shinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination, but with all safety systems fully in operation, or the divine imagination will lead us into complete paranoia.”

“Nature conserves, prefers novelty.”

“The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. That's what science is good for.”

“What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.”

“Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.”

“Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.”

“The great Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport had died years before I entered the program, but he had written an "Epistle to Thesis Writers" that was still being handed down from generation to generation of doctoral candidates. Allport tried to steer students away from the clutter and fog of professional prose and offered as a model an essay by a ten-year-old girl, who, he wrote, merited a higher degree "if not for the accuracy of her knowledge, then at least for the clarity of her diction":”

“A man who knows what other men know,know nothing for they all know the same”

“Believe it or not, but most fundamental parts of Machine Man science are actually all about believing, not knowing.”

“We all have an unscientific weakness for being always in the right, and this weakness seems to be particularly common among professional and amateur politicians. But the only way to apply something like scientific method in politics is to proceed on the assumption that there can be no political move which has no drawbacks, no undesirable consequences. To look out for these mistakes, to find them, to bring them into the open, to analyse them, and to learn from them, this is what a scientific politician as well as a political scientist must do. Scientific method in politics means that the great art of convincing ourselves that we have not made any mistakes, of ignoring them, of hiding them, and of blaming others from them, is replaced by the greater art of accepting the responsibility for them, of trying to learn from them, and of applying this knowledge so that we may avoid them in future.”