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Terence McKenna 111
American ethnobotanist 1946–2000Related quotes
“The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history.”
1940s, Third Inaugural Address (1941)
Context: The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the Middle Ages. It was written in Magna Charta.
The Deception: Nietzsche's Optimism (p.47-8)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)
“The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.”
Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.28
“Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies.”
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday
Context: The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun's rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.
“History is the biography of the human race.”
Other
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!”
Letter to John Adams (1 August 1816)
1810s