“We — mankind — stand at the center of an evolutionary crisis, with a new evolutionary device — our consciousness of the crisis — as our unique contribution.”

The New Divinity (1964)
Context: Eventually the old ideas will no longer serve, the old ideological framework can no longer be tinkered up to bear the weight of the facts, and a radical reconstruction becomes necessary, leading eventually to the emergence of a quite new organisation of thought and belief, just as the emergence of new types of bodily organization was necessary to achieve biological advance. Such major organizations of thought may be necessary in science as much as in religion. The classical example, of course, was the re-patterning of cosmological thought which demoted the earth from its central position and led to the replacement of the geocentric pattern of thought by a heliocentric one. I believe that an equally drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern.

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 67

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 16

LSD - Terence Mckenna - The Purpose Of Psychedelics http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=27759640
Context: My notion of what the psychedelic experience is, for us, that we each must become like fishermen, and go out on to the dark ocean of mind, and let our nets down into that sea. And what you're after is not some behemoth, that will tear through your nets, follow them and drag you in your little boat, you know, into the abyss, nor are what we're looking for a bunch of sardines that can slip through your net and disappear. Ideas like, "Have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril?", and stuff like that. What we are looking for are middle-size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they're incomprehensible. Middle-size ideas we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have fish dinner. And every one of us when we go into the psychedelic state, this is what we should be looking for. It's not for your elucidation, it's not part of your self-directed psychotherapy. You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it's really all about.

Source: Witness (1952), p. 7

Statement (April 1936), quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe 1914-1940 (London: Arnold, 1995), p. 182.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

Source: The Turning Point (1982), Ch. 1. The Turning of the Tide.

Non-Progress: A Theory of Consciousness (p. 171)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)