text:
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Kemal Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal Pasha until 1934, Kamâl Atatürk from 1935 to 1937, commonly referred to as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; 1881 – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish field marshal and revolutionary statesman who was the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey. His benevolent dictatorship undertook sweeping progressive reforms, which modernized Turkey into a secular, industrializing nation. Ideologically a secularist and nationalist, his policies and theories became known as Kemalism. Due to his military and political accomplishments, Atatürk is regarded according to studies as one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century.

Quotes

 * Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.
 * Orders to the 57th Infantry Regiment during the Gallipoli campaign (25 April 1915); as quoted in Studies in Battle Command by Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, p. 89; also quoted in Turkey (2007) by Verity Campbell, p. 188
 * Variant translation: I am not ordering you to fight, I am ordering you to die.

 * If you don't have ammunition, you have bayonets! FIX BAYONETS! GET DOWN!
 * Instructions to his soldiers to answer an ANZAC attack on Chunuk Bair (25 April 1915)

 * Our life here is truly hellish. Fortunately, my soldiers are very brave and tougher than the enemy.
 * Letter to Corinne Lütfü, from the Gallipoli peninsula (20 July 1915) as translated in Atatürk: The Biography of the founder of Modern Turkey (2002) by Andrew Mango. ISBN 158567334X

 * Hattı müdafaa yoktur, sathı müdafaa vardır. O satıh bütün vatandır.
 * There is no defense line, but defense territory. This territory is the whole of the motherland!
 * His order to the Turkish army at the Battle of the Sakarya (26 August 1921); Turkish, as quoted in Bugünkü Türkiye (1937), by Stephan Ronart, p. 127
 * Variant: Hattı müdafaa yoktur, sathı müdafaa vardır. O satıh bütün vatandır. Vatanın her karış toprağı, vatandaşın kanıyla ıslanmadıkça terk olunamaz…
 * Variant translation: There is no defense line, but a defense territory, and that territory is the whole of the motherland. Not even an inch of the motherland may be abandoned without being soaked in the blood of her citizens...
 * English translation, as quoted in History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (1976) by Stanford Jay Shaw

 * Milletin hayatı tehlikeye maruz kalmadıkça, savaş bir cinayettir.
 * Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.
 * Variant translation: Unless a nation's citizens are in danger, war is a crime.
 * "Adana Çiftçileriyle Konuşma" (16 March 1923); English translation as delivered in an address by Talat S. Halman (10 November 1995), quoted in The Turkish Times (1 December 1995)

 * Our object now is to strengthen the ties that bind us to other nations. There may be a great many countries in the world, but there is only one civilization, and if a nation is to achieve progress, she must be a part of this civilization. The Ottoman Empire began to decline the day when, proud of her success against the West, she cut the ties that bound her to the European nations.
 * Speech to the press (29 October 1923), quoted in Vakur Versan, 'The Kemalist Reform of Turkish Law and Its Impact', in Jacob M. Landau (ed.), Atatürk and the Modernization of Turkey (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984), p. 247

 * In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.
 * Speech (October 1927); also quoted in Atatürk’ten Düşünceler by E. Z. Karal, p. 59

 * You are the oldest democracy of the New World. We are the youngest democracy of the Old World. You, the great democracy of the New World, should take due note of your new sister democracy and should conceive its import. We are friends now, and we will be much closer friends in the future.
 * Address to the American Ambassador to Turkey in 1927. As quoted in: Under Secretary Eugene V. Rostow (April 4, 1968): The United States and Turkey, Partners in World Security. Address made before the American-Turkish Society Inc., at New York, N.Y. on April 4, 1968. Source: United States Department of State (April 20, 1968): The Department of State Bulletin, Volume 58, page 559. Archived from the original on November 4, 2023. See also Google Books PDF-Page of aforementioned source, which was archived from the original on November 4, 2023.

 * ...O Turkish child of future generations! As you see, even under these circumstances and conditions, it is your duty to save the Turkish Independence and the Republic! The strength that you will need is present in the noble blood which flows in your veins!
 * Address To Turkish Youth (20 October 1927)

 * Today the Soviet Union is a friend and an ally. We need this friendship. However, no one can know what will happen tomorrow. Just like the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires it may tear itself apart or shrink in size. Those peoples that it holds so tightly in its grip may one day slip away. The world may see a new balance of power. It is then that Turkey must know what to do. Ally Soviets have under their control our brothers with whom we share language, beliefs and roots. We must be prepared to embrace them. Being ready does not mean that we will sit quietly and wait. We must get ready. How does a people get prepared for such an endeavour? By strengthening the natural bridges that exist between us. Language is a bridge... Religion is a bridge... History is a bridge... We must delve into our roots and reconstruct what history has divided. We can't wait for them to approach us. We must reach out to them.
 * Speech at Çankaya Mansion (29 October 1933); also quoted in Orta(daki) Asya Ülkeleri, Mustafa Balbay, Cumhuriyet Kitapları

 * Bu memleketin toprakları üstünde kanlarını döken kahramanlar! Burada dost bir vatanın toprağındasınız. Huzur ve sükun içinde uyuyunuz. Sizler Mehmetçiklerle yan yana koyun koyunasınız. Uzak diyarlardan evlatlarını harbe gönderen analar! Gözyaşlarınızı dindiriniz. Evlatlarınız bizim bağrımızdadır, huzur içindedirler ve huzur içinde rahat rahat uyuyacaklardır. Onlar bu toprakta canlarını verdikten sonra artık bizim evlatlarımız olmuşlardır.
 * The heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives on this country's soil! You are in the soil of a friendly country now. Therefore rest in peace. You are side by side with the little Mehmets. The mothers who send their sons to the war! Wipe your tears away. Your sons are in our bosom, are in peace and will be sleeping in peace comfortably. From now on, they have became our sons since they have lost their lives on this land.
 * A tribute to those ANZACs who died in Gallipoli (1934), this is inscribed on Atatürk memorial at Tarakena Bay in Wellington, New Zealand

 * ...Fakat bu prensipleri, gökten indiği sanılan kitapların dogmalarıyla asla bir tutmamalıdır. Biz, ilhamlarımızı, gökten ve gaipten değil, doğrudan doğruya hayattan almış bulunuyoruz. Bizim yolumuzu çizen; içinde yaşadığımız yurt, bağrından çıktığımız Türk milleti ve bir de milletler tarihinin bin bir fâcia ve ıstırap kaydeden yapraklarından çıkardığımız netîcelerdir.
 * Our principles must never be equated with the dogmas of books supposed to have come down from heaven. We derive our inspiration, not from heaven, or from an unseen world, but directly from life. Our path is guided by the homeland we live in, the Turkish nation of which we are members, and the conclusions we have drawn from the history of nations, which records a thousand and one disasters and sufferings.
 * Statement to the Turkish Grand National Assembly on 1 November 1937; also quoted in Atatürk: The Biography of the founder of Modern Turkey (2002) by Andrew Mango

 * Tarih yazmak, tarih yapmak kadar mühimdir. Yazan yapana sadık kalmazsa değişmeyen hakikat, insanlığı şaşırtacak bir mahiyet alır.
 * To write history is as important as to make history. If the writer does not remain true to the maker, then the unchanging truth takes on a quality that will confuse the humanity.
 * As quoted by Hasan Cemil Çambel in T.T.K. Belleten (1939), Vol: 3, no: 10, p. 272, Turkish Republic Ministry of Culture

 * A nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten.
 * As quoted in Ataturk (1944) by M. M. Mousharrafa, p. 130

 * Yurtta Sulh, Cihanda Sulh.
 * Peace at Home, Peace in the World.
 * Maxim which became the motto of the Republic of Turkey; quoted in many sources including, Atatürk (1963) by Uluğ İğdemir, p. 200; and Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus (2000) by Svante E. Cornell, p. 287

 * Lasting peace is sought, it is essential to adopt international measures to improve the lot of the masses. The welfare of the entire human race must replace hunger and oppression. People of the world must be taught to give up envy, avarice and rancour.
 * As quoted in I. Milletlerarası Gençlik Kongresi [First International Youth Congress] (1988) by Selçuk University, p. 19

 * Even before accepting the religion of the Arabs, the Turks were a great nation. After accepting the religion of the Arabs, this religion, didn't effect to combine the Arabs, the Persians and Egyptians with the Turks to constitute a nation. (This religion) rather, loosened the national nexus of Turkish nation, got national excitement numb. This was very natural. Because the purpose of the religion founded by Muhammad, over all nations, was to drag to an including Arab national politics.
 * As quoted in Medenî Bilgiler ve M. Kemal Atatürk'ün El Yazıları [Civics and M. Kemal Atatürk's Manuscripts] (1998) by Afet İnan, p. 364

 * Kralların ve padişahların istibdadına dinler mesnet olmuştur.
 * Religions have been basis of the tyranny of kings and sultans.
 * As quoted in Medenî Bilgiler ve M. Kemal Atatürk'ün El Yazıları [Civics and M. Kemal Atatürk's Manuscripts] (1998) by Afet İnan, p. 438

 * Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.
 * As quoted in The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations (1993) by Lewis D. Eigen and Jonathan Paul Siegel, p. 424; also in Ataturk: First President and Founder of the Turkish Republic (2002) by Yüksel Atillasoy, p. 15

 * Religion is an important institution. A nation without religion cannot survive. Yet it is also very important to note that religion is a link between Allah and the individual believer. The brokerage of the pious cannot be permitted. Those who use religion for their own benefit are detestable. We are against such a situation and will not allow it. Those who use religion in such a manner have fooled our people; it is against just such people that we have fought and will continue to fight. Know that whatever conforms to reason, logic, and the advantages and needs of our people conforms equally to Islam. If our religion did not conform to reason and logic, it would not be the perfect religion, the final religion.
 * As quoted in Kemalizm, Laiklik ve Demokrasi [Kemalism, Laicism and Democracy] (1994) by Ahmet Taner Kışlalı

 * The foundation of our religion is very strong. The material is strong as well, but the building itself was neglected for hundreds of years. As the plaster dropped down, none thought to replace it and none felt the need to reinforce the building. Quite the contrary: many foreign elements and interpretations, as well as empty beliefs, came along and damaged it still more.
 * As quoted in Kemalizm, Laiklik ve Demokrasi [Kemalism, Laicism and Democracy] (1994) by Ahmet Taner Kışlalı

 * Sesiniz, benim sesimdir. Unutmayınız!
 * Your voice is my voice. Do not forget it!
 * Statement made to those going to foreign nations or international conferences, as quoted by F. Rıfkı Atay; also quoted (in Turkish) in Atatürk ve çevresindekiler [Atatürk and his Entourage] (1995) by Kemal Arıburnu, p. 128
 * Variant translation: Your voice is my voice. Do not forget!

 * İstikbal göklerdedir.
 * The future is in the skies.
 * Atatürk's comment on aerospace-aeronautics, as quoted in Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (2001), p. 126 by Sibel Bozdoğan

 * Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say "What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?" If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.
 * As quoted by Paul Wolfowitz in an address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D.C. (13 March 2002)

 * İki Mustafa Kemal vardır: Biri ben, et ve kemik, geçici Mustafa Kemal... İkinci Mustafa Kemal, onu "ben" kelimesiyle ifade edemem; o, ben değil, bizdir! O, memleketin her köşesinde yeni fikir, yeni hayat ve büyük ülkü için uğraşan aydın ve savaşçı bir topluluktur. Ben, onların rüyasını temsil ediyorum. Benim teşebbüslerim, onların özlemini çektikleri şeyleri tatmin içindir. O Mustafa Kemal sizsiniz, hepinizsiniz. Geçici olmayan, yaşaması ve başarılı olması gereken Mustafa Kemal odur.
 * There are two Mustafa Kemals: One is me, the flesh-and-blood, mortal Mustafa Kemal … The second Mustafa Kemal,… I can not express it with the word “me”, it is not “me”, it is “we”. That is an intellectual and challenging society, struggling in every corner of the homeland for new ideas, new life and the great ideal. I represent their dream. My attempts are to satisfy the things they long. That Mustafa Kemal is you, all of you. That is the non provisional Mustafa Kemal that must live and succeed.
 * Published in the Milliyet on 11 May 1933; also quoted in Ataturk: First President and Founder of the Turkish Republic (2002) by Yüksel Atillasoy, p. 19

 * The nation has placed its faith in the precept that all laws should be inspired by actual needs here on earth as a basic fact of national life.
 * As quoted in A World View of Criminal Justice (2005) by Richard K. Vogler, p. 116

 * Humankind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible for humankind to grow by the improvement of only one part while the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains that the other half can soar into skies?
 * As quoted in "Atatürk" in Images of a Divided World (29 October 2006)
 * Variant translation: Humankind consists of two sexes, woman and man. Is it possible that a mass is improved by the improvement of only one part and the other ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains and the other half can soar into skies?

 * [Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.
 * As quoted in Ataturk : An Intellectual Biography (2011) by M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, p. 38

 * We did not win the war with prayers, but with the blood of our soldiers.
 * Explaining his dismissal of the imam assigned to the Turkish Grand National Assembly; as quoted in Ataturk : An Intellectual Biography (2011) by M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, p. 145

 * Turkey's true master is the peasant.
 * As quoted in U.S.A. Toddler Importing as a Turkish Businessman (2011) by Thomas Chi, p. 27

 * I do not leave any verses, dogmas, nor any moulded standard principles as moral heritage. My moral heritage is science and reason. What I have done and intended to do for the Turkish nation lies in that. Anyone willing to appropriate my ideas for themselves after me will be my moral inheritors provided they would approve the guidance of science and reason on this axis.
 * As quoted in Kemalist Devrim ve İdeolojisi (1980) by İsmet Giritli, İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayınları, p. 13

 * The torch that the Turkish nation holds in her hand and in her mind, while marching on the road of progress and civilisation, is positive sciences.
 * Speech on the tenth anniversary of the Republic, 1933

 * Sovereignty and kingship are never decided by academic debate. They are seized by force. The Ottoman dynasty appropriated by force the government of the Turks, and reigned over them for six centuries. Now the Turkish nation has effectively gained possession of its sovereignty… This is an accomplished fact… If those assembled here … see the matter in its natural light, we shall all agree. Otherwise, facts will still prevail, but some heads may roll.
 * Abolition of the Ottoman sultanate, 1922; also quoted in Nutuk (1927) by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

 * Science is the most real guide for civilisation, for life, for success in the world. To search for a guide other than science is absurdity, ignorance and heresy.
 * As quoted in Atatürkçülük, Volume I, General Staff of the Republic of Turkey, Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1984, p. 283

 * The Republic of Turkey cannot be a country of sheikhs, dervishes, and disciples. The truest, most real order is the order of civilisation.
 * As quoted in Atatürk'ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, Volume II, p. 215

 * Victory belongs to those who can say 'Victory is mine'. Success belongs to those who can begin saying 'I will succeed' and say 'I have succeed' in the end.
 * Published in the Hakimiyet-i Milliye on 12 January 1925.

 * To see me does not necessarily mean to see my face. To understand my thoughts, my feelings is to have seen me.
 * As quoted in Atatürk by Prof. Dr. Utkan Kocatürk, Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları, p. 207

 * I once went through books and wanted to understand what philosophers said about life. Some of them saw everything as dark. "Since we are nothing and we will reach zero, there is no room for joy and happiness during our temporary life on earth," they said. I read other books, written by wiser men. They were saying: "Since the end is zero anyway, let us at least be joyful and cheerful as long as we live." For my own character I like the second view of life, but within these limits: A man who sees the existence of all mankind in his own person is pathetic. Obviously that man will perish as an individual. What is necessary for any man to be satisfied and happy as long as he lives is not to work for himself, but for those who will come after him. Only in this way can a man of understanding act. Complete pleasure and happiness in life can only be found in working for the honor, existence and happiness of future generations.
 * Conversation with Romanian Foreign Minister Victor Antonescu on 20 March 1937

 * Armenians have no rights in this prosperous country. Your country is yours, it belongs to the Turks. This country was Turkish in history, therefore it is Turkish and will live as a Turk forever.
 * Published in the Hakimiyet-i Milliye on 21 March 1923.

 * Why after my years of education, after studying the secular civilization and the socialization process, should I decent to the level of common people, I will make them rise to my level, let me not resemble them, they should resemble me!
 * Diary entry in Karlsbad on 6 July 1918; also quoted in Ataturk: Founder of Modern Turkey, a biographical documentary about Atatürk

Disputed

 * I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.
 * Quoted in Atatürk: The Biography of the founder of Modern Turkey, by Andrew Mango; "In a book published in 1928, Grace Ellison quotes [Atatürk], presumably in 1926-27", Grace Ellison Turkey Today (London: Hutchinson, 1928)
 * However, according to Atatürk's notebooks, he states in his own handwriting that a British journalist (referring to Grace Ellison) wrote what he did not say and distorted what he said: "A British newspaper reporter interviewed me. She wrote things I didn't tell her and interpreted what I said against us. I forbade her. She had promised. I realized that she is a trained spy like the other people in Istanbul." As quoted in Atatürk'ün not defterleri (Atatürk's notebooks). Volume 12 (in Turkish) (1st ed.). Ankara: Genelkurmay Basımevi. 2009. p. 125. ISBN 978-975-409-246-2.
 * For nearly five hundred years, these rules and theories of an Arab Shaikh and the interpretations of generations of lazy and good-for-nothing priests have decided the civil and criminal law of Turkey. They have decided the form of the Constitution, the details of the lives of each Turk, his food, his hours of rising and sleeping the shape of his clothes, the routine of the midwife who produced his children, what he learned in his schools, his customs, his thoughts-even his most intimate habits. Islam – this theology of an immoral Arab – is a dead thing. Possibly it might have suited tribes in the desert. It is no good for modern, progressive state. God’s revelation! There is no God! These are only the chains by which the priests and bad rulers bound the people down. A ruler who needs religion is a weakling. No weaklings should rule.
 * As quoted in Grey Wolf: Mustafa Kemal – An intimate study of a dictator (1932) by Harold Courtenay Armstrong, pp. 199-200

Quotes about Atatürk

 * He is a man born out of due season, an anachronism, a throw-back to the Tartars of the Steppes, a fierce elemental force of a man. Had he been born in the centuries when all Central Asia was on the move he would have ridden out with Sulyman Shah under the banner of the Grey Wolf, and with the heart and instincts of a Grey Wolf. With his military genius, and his ruthless determination unweakened by sentiments, loyalties or moralities, he might well have been a Tamerlane or a Jenghis Khan riding at the head of great hordes of wild horsemen, conquering countries, devouring and destroying cities, and filling in the intervals of peace between campaigns with wild and hideous orgies of wine and women.
 * Harold Courtenay Armstrong, in Grey Wolf: Mustafa Kemal – An intimate study of a dictator (fifth cheap edition, July 1935), p. 333

 * Most terrible of all the terrible Turks.
 * Lord Balfour, in THE TWO KEMALS; The Polished Aristocrat of European Circles in Contrast With the Ruthless Commander of Fanatical Turks, New York Times, 1 October 1922.

 * Shakespeare wrote, Einstein thought, Atatürk built.
 * Bill Clinton, address to the International Trade Organization, as quoted in HR-Net (January 5, 2000)

 * Atatürk was the first to show that it is possible to mobilize and regenerate the resources that a country has lost. In this respect Atatürk was a teacher; Mussolini was his first and I his second student.
 * Adolf Hitler (20 April 1938), quoted in Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (2014), p. 116

 * Turkey had been our ally in the World War. Its unfortunate result was as heavy a burden for Turkey as it was for us. The great and ingenious reconstructor of the new Turkey gave his Allies, beaten by fate, the first example of resurrection. While Turkey, thanks to the realistic attitude of her State leadership, preserved her independent attitude Yugoslavia fell a victim to British intrigues.
 * Adolf Hitler, addressed to the Reichstag on 4 May 1941.

 * The rapidity with which Mustapha Kemal Ataturk rid himself of his parsons makes one of the most remarkable chapters in history. He hanged thirty-nine of them out of hand, the rest he flung out, and St. Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum!
 * Adolf Hitler (1 August 1942), quoted in Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.), Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944 (2008), p. 458

 * The exploits of your leaders in many a historic field of battle; the progress of your Revolution; the rise and career of the great Atatürk, his revitalization of your nation by his great statesmanship, courage and foresight all these stirring events are well-known to the people of Pakistan.
 * Muhammad Ali Jinnah, replying to a speech made by the first Turkish Ambassador to Pakistan at the time of presenting credentials to the Quaid-i-Azam (4 March 1948)

 * The name of Atatürk brings to mind the historic accomplishments of one of the great men of this century, his inspired leadership of the Turkish people, his perceptive understanding of the modern world and his boldness as a military leader.
 * John F. Kennedy, speaking in Washington D.C. (10 November 1963), on the 25th commemoration of Atatürk's death.

 * Above all, he was a builder, the greatest nation-builder of modern times.
 * Andrew Mango, in Ataturk (2011), p. 6

 * ...Greece, which has the highest estimation of the renowned leader, heroic soldier, and enlightened creator of Turkey. We will never forget that President Atatürk was the true founder of the Turkish-Greek alliance based on a framework of common ideals and peaceful cooperation. He developed ties of friendship between the two nations which it would be unthinkable to dissolve. Greece will guard its fervent memories of this great man, who determined an unalterable future path for the noble Turkish nation.
 * Ioannis Metaxas, his comment about Atatürk

 * The centuries rarely produce a genius. It is our bad luck that the great genius of our era was granted to the Turkish nation. We could not beat Mustafa Kemal.
 * This seems to have originated in Kurtuluş (1994), a Turkish TV series, in which David Lloyd George is portrayed as saying this, as George Nathaniel Curzon was making a complaint against Raymond Poincaré; it has sometimes become quoted as an actual remark of the British Prime Minister, but no prior citations of such a statement have yet been found.
 * Variant translation: The genius of our century — centuries rarely produce a genius. Look at this bad luck of ours, that the great genius of our era was granted to the Turkish nation.

 * Now, this morning I had the great privilege of visiting the tomb of your extraordinary founder of your republic. And I was deeply impressed by this beautiful memorial to a man who did so much to shape the course of history. But it is also clear that the greatest monument to Ataturk's life is not something that can be cast in stone and marble. His greatest legacy is Turkey's strong, vibrant, secular democracy, and that is the work that this assembly carries on today.
 * Barack Obama, Remarks to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara (6 April 2009)

title: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk


text:
Absolutely Fabulous

Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2004), created by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, follows the absurd antics of drug-addled public relations consultant Edina "Eddy" Monsoon (Saunders) and her best friend, model, and professional hanger-on Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), as they deal with post-Flower Power life, aggravated further by Eddy's infuriatingly intellectual, responsible daughter Saffron.

Fashion (1.01)

 * Edina: ..And if you're a bloody psychic psychologist how come I'm always having to phone you?

 * Patsy: What will you drink if you stop drinking?
 * Edina: I shall drink water.
 * Patsy: [Blank look]
 * Edina: It's a mixer, Patsy, we have it with whisky.

Fat (1.02)

 * Saffy: You've been getting dressed for three hours and you still look like a bloated citrus fruit.

 * Edina: You are what you eat, remember?
 * Saffy: Which makes you a very large vegetarian tart.

 * Edina: I mean what you two don't seem to realise is that inside of me, inside of me, there is a thin person just screaming to get out.
 * Mother: Just the one, dear?

France (1.03)

 * Edina: [to Bubble] You, remember, cancel my aromatherapy, my psychotherapy, my reflexology, my osteopath, my homeopath, my naturopath, my crystal reading, my shiatsu, my organic hairdresser. And see if I can be re-birthed next Thursday afternoon.
 * Bubble: [Crossing her fingers] Consider it done!

 * Patsy: The last mosquito that bit me had to check into the Betty Ford clinic.

Iso Tank (1.04)

 * [Edina's threatening to adopt a Romanian baby]
 * Edina: I wonder how you do go about it.
 * Saffy: I should imagine you would have to go to Romania.
 * Edina: Oh don't be stupid, darling. I'm sure they could send over a selection and I could pick one.

 * [Discussing the Romanian babies]
 * Edina: I'll just be able to send them back, won't I sweetie? Hmm?
 * Patsy: Sell 'em on. Mark 'em up, sell 'em on!

Birthday (1.05)

 * Edina: Sweetie, don't you need some help, or something?
 * Saffy: No, please don't. You've only ever used this cooker to light your fags off of!
 * Edina: Darling, that is simply not... No, that is true.
 * [Saffy slaps Edina.]
 * Edina: Did you just hit me? That's illegal, isn't it?

 * Bo: She's not handling this 40 thing too well, is she? I mean, golly, I wish I could tell her it's no big deal. I had a ball on my 40th birthday. I felt really strong, really sorted-out about it. I realized what a lucky, wonderful person I was. And whether in your 30s or your 40s, you're still the same gorgeous person. Enjoy life!
 * Mother: When will you be 50?
 * [Bo starts hyperventilating.]
 * Marshall: She hasn't started 50 therapy yet.

Magazine (1.06)

 * [Discussing Patsy's job at the magazine]
 * Edina: Anyway Patsy's got that job for life.
 * Saffy: You don't mean to say she's actually good at something?
 * Edina: No, darling, she slept with the publisher!
 * Patsy: And I'm bloody good at it!

 * Saffy: So what does a fashion director actually do?
 * Edina: Oh, darling, she gets a 50% discount at Harvey Nicks.
 * Patsy: It's not only that, I mean there is work involved, y'know, skill.
 * Edina: Yeah, course there is.
 * Patsy: I decide what goes in the magazine. Y'know, one snap of my fingers and I can raise hemlines so high that the world is your gynaecologist!

 * Edina[to Saffy]: Not one bloody boyfriend in the whole time that I've known you! I mean, you're not that bloody ugly! What's the matter with you? Huh? Have you read that "Karma Sutra" I gave you? No! That Dutch cap has only ever seen the light of day. I mean, God! Here I am, your mother, poised for your first sexual experience and night after night, dry bloody sheets! I'm sorry, darling, but I don't want a little moustached virgin for a daughter, so do something about it!

Hospital (2.01)

 * Nurse: [pointing at Patsy] Facelift.
 * Doctor: Oh it'll be a doddle. Grab her by the scalp, shake her up and down a bit and cut off the slack! Tomorrow.

 * Nurse: Is this your daughter?
 * Edina: [looks at Saffy and back to the Nurse] Yes.
 * Nurse: Well, maybe there's a God after all.

 * Fleur: [picking up face cream] Have you tried this? It's a triple acting, alpha-hydroxy acid natural complex to reactivate your skin making you... scientifically more beautiful!
 * Catriona: Sounds good!
 * Fleur: "Dermatologists and opthamologists tested non-acnegenic-.." I don't know what this means but it's forcing me to believe it!

 * Dream Saffy: And I've decided not to go to university. I'm going to bum around Europe experimenting with drugs, wearing flared denim for as long as it's fashionable.

Death (2.02)

 * Edina: I'm sorry, darling. It's just had some rather bad news today, that's all.
 * Patsy: I need a drink!
 * Edina: It's very bad news actually, Pats.
 * Patsy: Oh what?
 * Edina: I'm dying!
 * Patsy: You can't!
 * Edina: Well I am!
 * Patsy: Well what am I supposed to do if you die?
 * Edina: Get cabs!

 * [Discussing guests for the funeral]
 * Edina: God, I hope you're not inviting that bloody, bollocky, selfish, two-faced, chicken bastard, pig-dog-man, are you??
 * Saffy: You could just say "Dad!" I'd still know what you meant!

Morocco (2.03)

 * [Eddy points to her bag of "Pop-specs".]
 * Saffy: It's a sticker with a green tree on it.
 * Edina: Yes.
 * Saffy: What does that mean?
 * Edina: Kind to trees, sweetie.
 * Saffy: How are they kind to trees?
 * Edina: Well they ain't made of wood, how kind do you want!?

 * Patsy: [Feels her stomach in discomfort]
 * Edina: Have you eaten something?
 * Patsy: No, not since 1973.

New Best Friend (2.04)

 * Patsy: [About Bettina] She was so anally retentive she couldn't sit down for fear of sucking up the furniture.

 * Patsy: I should have sued. I was cut to ribbons, I was scarred for life!
 * Saffy: Extraordinary how it managed to hit you in exactly the same place behind each ear!

Poor (2.05)

 * Patsy: [Running down the stairs with four cigarettes in her mouth] Light! Light! Light!
 * Edina: [Provides a light] Pats, honestly...
 * Patsy: Bloody hell!
 * Edina: Not another no smoking cab, Pats? They must see you coming these days.
 * Patsy: Bloody bastard asthmatic cab driver!

 * Edina: Can I just say one word in my defence?
 * Saffy: I don't think that's a good idea, mum, your mouth is working for the prosecution.

Birth (2.06)

 * [Eddy is throwing out her clothes as fire damage for the insurance]
 * Saffy: I could take these down to the charity shop.
 * Edina: Splutters. You cannot give these sort of clothes to the poor! Darling, I'm sure they've got enough to contend with without the added humiliation of wearing last season's, sweetie!

 * Patsy: Ey, Eddy, Eddy, remember that weekend with Mick and the boys? Laughs Fantastic!
 * Edina: Fabulous days, darling. [To Saffy] Patsy used to go out with Keith Moon, sweetie.
 * Patsy: Yeah, sort of. I mean, I woke up underneath him in a hotel bedroom once.
 * Edina: Yeah, still, that was going steady for the 60s, believe me.

Doorhandle (3.01)

 * Saffy: It was my birthday today, Mum. [storms upstairs]
 * Edina: You come back here, don't you think you can just say something like that, hit and run! Now listen, I gave you that birthday, darling. You wouldn't have that birthday if I hadn't been generous enough to uncross my legs and give you to the world, darling. Nobody's thanked me, have they?!

 * Bubble: She told me you had a tattoo on your unspeakables!
 * Edina: I didn't!
 * Patsy: Eddy?
 * Edina: I didn't. Unmentionables, I said.
 * Saffy: That could be anywhere on her!

Happy New Year (3.02)

 * Edina: My New Year's resolution, sweetie… to have more fun! What's yours, Pats?
 * Patsy: Ohh, well, I think I'll just try to be more relaxed.
 * Saffy: You? More relaxed? What is that, dead? Well, that cancels out my resolution.

 * Edina: This is my daughter, Saffy.
 * Jackie: Never mind, too late to flush her now
 * Justin: I'm Saffy's father.
 * Jackie: How sweet of you to admit to a thing like that.

 * Justin: Did you have the same father?
 * Jackie: No one knows. Mother was such a slut.
 * Patsy: It could have been any of the men in any of the bars in France. Y'know, she was always the entertainment.
 * Oliver: Before slot machines?
 * Edina: She was the slot machine!

Sex (3.03)

 * [Edina and Patsy are looking at the pornographic magazine 'Razzle,' that Saffy found in her brother's room]
 * Saffron: It's disgusting! That is so degrading to women!
 * Patsy: What do you mean? She's got the whip!

 * Saffy: I think we should have a little talk, don't you?
 * Edina: Have you seen this, darling, this Nancy Friday? It's extraordinary! She gets complete strangers to relate their filthiest thoughts and then sells them as therapy. It's fantastic!
 * Saffy: Mum, I want to know what you're planning for tomorrow night.
 * Edina: Armpit kissing! Would you kiss an arm-..
 * Saffy: [Interrupting] I want to know!
 * Edina: Sweetie, it is simply the extrication of myself from the burden of sexual norms, and the restoration of my own powerful, and integrated sexuality.
 * Saffy: An orgy?
 * Edina: Yeah, that's the one.

--
 * Saffy: Ok, I got you condoms and femidoms. You are going to be safe, right?
 * Edina: Yes of course sweetie. [Looking in the bag]
 * Saffy: Have you opened these?
 * Grandma: They don't put fingers on these gloves.

Jealous (3.04)

 * Claudia: Next week's very busy for me. I'm launching Erica Jong's new book, 'Sex With Myself' at Sticky Fingers. Bill's thrilled, he loves huge openings!

 * Patsy: Anyway, I just have to tell these tragic, little wannabes, do you know what I tell them? I say, darling, "just stick your fingers down your throat, hack off your tits, keep taking the tablets and don't come back until you're looking like something!" Y'know?
 * Naomi Campbell: Yeah, I remember you.

Fear (3.05)

 * Mother: Talking to yourself, dear? That's the first sign of madness, y'know?
 * Edina: Really? I thought it was talking to you!

 * Magda: [on the phone] No, no, no, mate. I don't even get out of bed and piss for that kinda money!

The End (3.06)

 * Patsy: Darling, if you want to talk bollocks and discover the meaning of life you're better off just downing a bottle of whisky. At least that way you're unconscious by the time you start to take yourself seriously!

 * Bubble: Oh, the police phoned. They've released your mother.
 * Edina: Damn!
 * Bubble: Good, though, ain't it? 'Cause they haven't had a record out for years!

 * Saffy: No! This is not how it's going to be anymore, Mum! I'm not going to be here just to put you to bed, to feed you, stub out your joints, clear out the sick, lie for you, disapprove of you. And not just you. [rounds on Patsy] You as well! Cesspit from hell! Stinking bag of bones that haunts this house every day like a mouldering cadaver, leeching the lifeblood out of everything it can get its filthy suckers onto! I'm fed up being suckered! I won't take this anymore! This is not how it's going to be!

Paralox (4.01)

 * [Eddy has started practising yoga]
 * Edina: Couple of weeks and I'll be bending like Madonna, won't I darling? I'll be able to kiss my own arse from both directions!

 * Mother: [Riding on Eddy's scooter] You used to have one of these when you were a girl!
 * Edina: Yeah, but I was never allowed on it.
 * Mother: No, you were too big for it, you wobbled.
 * Edina: The scooter wobbled!
 * Mother: If you say so..
 * Edina: I have perfect balance, [to Saffy] sweetheart, look.
 * Mother: Wheels don't buckle on their own.

Fish Farm (4.02)

 * [Edina and Patsy have just returned from a Marilyn Manson gig]
 * Patsy: She tried to crowd surf and the tide went out!
 * Edina: The sea just parted, darling. I don't know how it happened
 * Saffy: They've probably never seen anything that old flying at them before

 * Edina: Right, time for another little drinky before we go.
 * Saffy: Where are you going?
 * Edina: New York.
 * Saffy: I didn't think they let people with drug convictions in.
 * Edina: Darling, it's not a conviction.
 * Patsy: Just a firm belief!

Paris (4.03)

 * Edina: [To Saffy] Why does everything you wear look like it's bearing a grudge, darling?

 * Patsy: It's a good photo, isn't it? I think the photographer really caught something
 * Saffy: Syphilis. [Patsy kicks Saffy in the shin]

 * Patsy: Put that book down, you're not showing me up.
 * Saffy: [To Edina] You see everything but yourself! You always have the best view in the room because you're not looking at you!

Donkey (4.04)

 * Patsy: Eddy, y'know, your stomach's like a dog that doesn't know when it's gunna be fed next so it just hangs around until you wanna kick it.

 * Edina: I'm a fat person, that's the end of it! Me! The woman who got stuck on an eating loop in Yo! Sushi! I mean, honestly, sweetheart! If they keep it coming round of course I'm gonna eat it, aren't I!?

Small Opening (4.05)

 * Saffy: You burnt and scarred my best friend!
 * Patsy: Who??
 * Edina: Titicaca.
 * Patsy: Oh. [nods]
 * Saffy: Her name is Sarah!
 * Edina: Darling, she was standing with her little pigtails too close to a candle!
 * Patsy: Act of God.
 * Saffy: You were holding the candle!

 * Saffy: My life is like a constant winter.
 * Edina: Yeah, well she never thawed, did she?
 * Patsy: Rigor mortis set into her in puberty
 * Edina: She's so cold, I bet she has her period in cubes

 * Edina: We've gotta kill this play! C'mon, how would I normally ensure a flop?
 * Bubble: Promote it!

Menopause (4.06)

 * Edina: The world has changed. I mean, there was a time I was out there. I was hip. I was dangerous. The Zeitgeist flew from me, sweetheart! I mean, I could pick up the lunch buzz at Momo and fly with it, darling, you know? The more money you spent, the more money you made; it was money on a loop. But not anymore, no. Not anymore, sweetheart--thanks to New Labour.
 * Saffy: [rolling her eyes] Oh no...
 * Edina: Oh yes, darling: the eternally-grinning funless world of New Labs, isn't it? All that hope, all that future, darling! But do you know something? Once the party's over, you look around, you're still standing in the shit! Nobody wants new things anymore, it's just, "Retro, retro, retro!" I mean, darling, we are skidding backwards into the 2000s on a slick of apology, and that's not a world that thinks I'm that great!

 * Katy: All right, I know I'm late, so don't look at me like that. I've been up all night with the baby. I don't know why it cries so much. I've got friends who use exactly the same sperm bank and theirs is perfect!

 * Patsy: I hate gynaecologists! A man who can always look you in the vagina but never in the eye!

 * Jobo: [to the MO group members] Come on sisters. We're getting nowhere.

[stands]
 * Jobo: My name is Jobo, and I'm happy to be having the menopause.

[group members clap for her]
 * Jobo: I have hot flushes and memory loss, and sometimes when I sneeze, I pee.
 * Beth De Woodi: [stands up] Beth De Woodi. The sands of time are trickling through my hour glass!
 * Patsy Stone: [raising her hand] Patsy Stone. I hope you're wearing thick underpants!
 * Edina Monsoon: [raising her hand] Edina Monsoon, STAND ON THE BLOODY BIN BAG!

 * Bo: Marshall, Marshall. Where do the stars go to have the menopause?
 * Marshall: Montana. And a small clinic in Arizona.
 * Bo: Well...Hitch up the wagons.  We're going West.

Cleanin' (5.01)

 * Edina: I don't want a great, big fat bum like J'Lo, do I, darling? Laughs I mean, how high have that woman's heels got to keep that nancy off the pavement now?

 * Bubble: [cleaning] Hoover, hoover, hoover...
 * Edina: YOU HAVE TO TURN IT ON, NOT JUST MAKE THE NOISE!

 * Edina: [to Emma Bunton] Well, darling, the trouble with you is you're not ... you're not kinda giving me anything! You know, if you want something from the tabs, you gotta give them something back! You're just kinda flatlining it, nice and sweet, are you? And they want a little bit of a heartbeat. They don't want to know your mum's your best friend, do they? They want you to be some one-armed lesbian asylum seeker! They want the full cellulite shots! They want a 40-in-the-bed perv orgy with your Spice mates! They want you mainlining, arm jacking, smack crack nightmare, darling! They want you-They want you filleted and splayed on the butcher's block so they can photograph all your organs for Heat magazine! I mean frankly, for once, I would like to see you foaming at the mouth, stinking of piss in the gutter with this little thumb stuck up Justin Timberlake's arse and you wearing nothing but a Gucci belt!

 * Catriona: Oh, tell her about your chocolate idea!
 * Fleur: Oh, right! Well, just near where we sell the sunglasses--
 * Patsy: No. One whiff of a cocoa bean and our customers would fly like vampires before garlic! Jeremy's must remain a sterile oasis free from street eaters and coffee carriers. Aseptic! And razor sharp as our customers' hip bones! These women shop for lunch! Labels are their only sustenance! Their skeleton legs and their Manolo Blahniks have worn trenches down the pavements of Sloane Street!
 * Fleur: I understand.
 * Patsy: Their arm sinews with just enough muscle left in their arms to lift up a credit card! Be clean! No chocolate!
 * [Fleur gently claps]
 * Fleur: Genius.
 * Patsy: Have I made myself perfectly clear?
 * Fleur: As ice.
 * Catriona: Transparent.
 * Patsy: And if you ever try anything like this again ... I WILL KILL YOU!

Book Clubbin' (5.02)

 * Mother: Well, I suppose I'd better be off. I've got to get this lot (her knitting) down to the charity shop.
 * Edina: Oh, God. No one's that poor.
 * Saffy: Or that shape!

 * [Patsy blows her cigarette smoke in Saffy's direction]
 * Saffy: [Cough] Mum!
 * Edina: Oh, don't be so stupid, smoke can't get in there, darling. Smoke can't touch the baby. If it could you'd have come out looking like prosciutto, believe me.
 * Patsy: Or Donatella, liver sausage in a wig

 * Midwife: I've got an antenatal clinic to get to, 30 sweaty, wobbling women. Squatting on the floor, focusing on their exit holes. All believing they can breathe their way through childbirth. I tell 'em, "When push comes to shove, you'll be screaming for drugs and shitting the bed!"

 * Midwife: You know my baby was so big it treated my inside like a smorgasbord, it picked my bones clean. I was a baby buffet. I was so long in labour they had to shave me twice.

Panickin' (5.03)

 * Saffy: Mum, you are just paying into the whole panic culture, I hate it. The world is actually safer than it's ever been. In fact, you're more likely to be hit by a bus!
 * Edina: Oh yeah, darling, that'd be ironic, wouldn't it? Closest I've ever been to public transport and it runs over me.

 * Patsy: I was at work today...
 * Saffy: Now we're all in shock!
 * Patsy: The girls were off, so I was on the floor...
 * Saffy: Nothing new for you!

 * Bubble: Minnie Driver? Is it a dwarf?

Huntin', Shootin' & Fishin' (5.04)

 * Edina: Who bloody needs 'em? Upper classes, who bloody needs 'em, sweetheart? They're all inbred anyway, aren't they?
 * Patsy: Yea, just a talking neck! Most of them have done away with features altogether! They have to marry a bit of common every now and again to ensure bone development!

 * [Patsy and Eddy are trying to work out what to do with the pheasant Eddy caught]
 * Patsy: Oh darling, just do what they do with unwanted house guests. Drug it, and dump it in Hyde Park!

Birthin' (5.05)

 * Bo: Hi, hi, hi! I want you to know I am in complete control. I know exactly what I'm doing.
 * Saffy: I need the midwife.
 * Bo: I'm a nurse!
 * Marshall: A dental nurse!
 * Bo: [To Marshall] She'll never know. [Back to Saffy] Ok, open wide!

 * Saffy: It feels really tight!!
 * Edina: Of course it's tight. It's all that olive oil you've rubbed into your perineum, darling, isn't it? You've marinated it! It's good for a barbecue, not for birth! That's what you've done, darling.
 * Saffy: I haven't been using it! Not since Patsy put a chili in it!!

Schmoozin' (5.06)

 * Edina: Darling, who was your favourite Stone?
 * Patsy: Oh darling, you didn't have a favourite Stone, you had 'em all!

Exploitin' (5.07)

 * Edina: Anyway, darling, if you could harm a baby by shaking it, you'd've been a goner! [Laughs] Patsy used to shake you about, didn't you?
 * Patsy: Yeah, when you'd swallowed pennies.
 * Edina: Yeah, always swallowing pennies, weren't you?
 * Patsy: Yeah, well we had to put them somewhere! You were like a little money box. Put one in, then shake it when we want it out again!

 * Edina: [On the phone to Saffy] Yeah, all right, darling... Well listen to me, we're coming home now... Didn't you get my note?.. Well all right, that's fine, we'll come home now, darling... Yeah, let's forget about education, shall we sweetheart? D-Dio..bio..versity.. and everything like that, sweetheart... We'll just come home now and live in the domain of ignorance, shall we, and watch Teletubbly videos if that's what you want!.. Yeah, all right, we'll see you in a minute... No, I am not drunk! How could I be drunk? I'm at the bloody zoo!

The Last Shout (1996)

 * Edina: Right, darling, we'll go to the office and I can drop you at your interview.
 * Saffy: Interview!? I thought she just slept with the publisher!

 * Edina: [Talking about Saffy and Paolo] They haven't done it, y'know. I don't think she's ever done it. I mean, she can't be that unattractive, is she? Is she?
 * Patsy: She is a virgin in a world where men will even turn to soft fruit for pleasure!

 * Edina: Do you remember your first time?
 * Patsy: Y'know it's all a blank with me until 1968.
 * Edina: Oh, yeah... God, I remember mine.
 * Patsy: What did you feel?
 * Edina: Well, just grateful, really, y'know.
 * Patsy: Why?
 * Edina: 'Cause you were always on my back!
 * Patsy: You'd think I'd remember that!

 * Edina: I was taken up, up to Heaven and I spoke with God.
 * Saffy: What about?
 * Edina: Well, shopping mainly...

Gay (2002)

 * Catriona: It is so lovely to have everything back to normal after that terrible thing last year.
 * Edina: Yes, yes... 7/11.
 * Saffy: (angrily) What?!
 * Edina: Oh, you know darling... the 24/7...Oh, 7/11!
 * Saffy: 9/11!
 * Edina: 9/11, I knew that!

 * [Edina meets her son, whom she finds out is gay but quite dull.]
 * Edina: Darling, being gay is the best excuse you'll ever have not to be boring!

Cold Turkey (2003)

 * Patsy: ..And I'm partial to an injection of adrenaline straight to the heart.

 * Patsy: Jacks, I don't remember any good times.
 * Jackie: Oh yes, darling. Parties! You remember the party we had when mother died? That was a great time. How happy we were...

 * Edina: And for lunch, sweetheart, for Christmas lunch, who comes to that?
 * Saffron: Well, there's me and John...
 * Patsy: Is he from Gabon?
 * Edina: What?
 * Patsy: Is he from Gabon?
 * Edina: Gabon?
 * Patsy: Yes, is he from Gabon?
 * Edina: Why are you saying that...
 * Patsy: Gabon.
 * Edina: Will you stop saying that!
 * Patsy: Will you ask her if he's from the Gabon.
 * Edina: [Irritated] Is he from Gabon?
 * Saffron: NO!
 * Edina: No, he's not from Gabon, so shut up!

 * John: I don't want to discuss vulgar matters, but when you are with the other fellow, what's the procedure? How do you decide who is the gentleman and who is the lady?
 * Justin: (looking uncomfortable) Well, I..I'm the lady.
 * John: Oh, you're the lady!

White Box (2004)

 * Edina: So what's the inspiration here?
 * Max: Holocaust.
 * Bettina: Don't you like it?
 * Edina: No, I love it, I love it, I think it's lovely, just thinking, perhaps something a little warmer…
 * Bettina: Max, turn on the pebbles.
 * [Max ignites an electric stone firepit.]
 * Bettina: COZY ENOUGH FOR YOU?

 * Edina: So [Max] has to take [Bettina] back to Broadmoor… she was only out on day release anyway.
 * Patsy: What's she in for?
 * Edina: Stabbing Kelly Hoppin with a glass shard at the design awards.

Regulars

 * Jennifer Saunders as Edina "Eddy" Monsoon
 * Joanna Lumley as Patsy Stone
 * Julia Sawalha as Saffron "Saffy" Monsoon
 * Jane Horrocks as Bubble
 * June Whitfield as Gran/Mother (Mrs. June Monsoon).

Guests

 * Lulu (singer) as herself
 * Christopher Malcolm as Justin
 * Naoko Mori as Sarah
 * Kathy Burke as Magda
 * Christopher Ryan as Marshall
 * Adrian Edmondson as Hamish
 * Helen Lederer as Catriona
 * Harriet Thorpe as Fleur
 * Miranda Richardson as Bettina
 * Patrick Barlow as Max
 * Mo Gaffney as Bo
 * Kate O'Mara as Jackie
 * Dawn French as Kathy

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Absolutely Fabulous


text:
Talk:Absolutely Fabulous

Page creation
I'm not a big fan of Absolutely Fabulous, but I happened to be watching my two favorite episodes (mainly for the hysterical Lady Penelope cameo in "Hospital" and Saffy's hilarious episode-ending secret in "Morocco"), and I just had to start this quote page. I probably won't get to any more in the near future, so I invite fans to contribute much more than this stub. — Jeff Q 14:17, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Continuing
Great idea! I shall try to add as much as I can, being a very avid fan of the show. Though my experience using Wikimedia is limited, so this is a learning curve for me.... dissmiss the numerous edits... -- 70.65.179.198 02:00, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

BTW
That above is me, I have now signed up. Xanadu 17:05, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Absolutely Fabulous


text:
Talk:Jar Jar Binks

This article was preserved after a vote for its deletion failed to achieve a consensus. See its archived VfD entry for details. — Jeff Q (talk) 04:43, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Iky iky goue is my favourite quote from Jar Jar, but dose anyone know a better way of writing it (spelling)? --81.215.81.19 02:29, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

title: Talk:Jar Jar Binks


text:
Talk:Fahrenheit 451

Merge Request
I would like to request that Fahrenheit 451 be merged with Ray Bradbury considering it is bradbury writing it and it's coda is in with ray bradbury... why have two pages? Just make this a separate section. --67.141.129.10 04:48, 3 March 2006 (UTC).

Page Numbers would be cool. Page numbers would be an awesome resource to have. *Then get out your book, say what edition it is in and start writing them down. *If you don't have a book you can't do this, hence the whole page numbers being useful.

What are quotes without the speaker cited?
Not true quotes.

You all need to put a page number on the quotes so it'll be easier to tell where it came from:

Could you stick a link on here to an online site that has fahrenheit 451 online?[text]

gooytjvhh yhhhh

book

title: Talk:Fahrenheit 451


text:
Terence McKenna

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American writer, philosopher, and ethnobotanist, who advocated paths of shamanism, and the use of hallucinogenic substances (primarily plant-based psychedelics) as a means of increasing many forms of human awareness. His ideas often revolve around his novelty theory of the universe.

Quotes

 * Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see. We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture—the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not—because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see. For Western Civilization, that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature.
 * Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles (17 October 1987)

 * There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient. We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, myth-making: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.
 * "New Maps of Hyperspace" (1989) (PDF). Originally published in Magical Blend magazine. Also in The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992).

 * The alternative physics is a physics of light. Light is composed of photons, which have no antiparticle. This means that there is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light, there is no time whatsoever. There is an experience of time zero. … The only experience of time that one can have is of a subjective time that is created by one's own mental processes, but in relationship to the Newtonian universe, there is no time whatsoever. One exists in eternity, one has become eternal, the universe is aging at a staggering rate all around one in this situation, but that is perceived as a fact of this universe—the way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe. One has transited into the eternal mode. One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity.
 * "New Maps of Hyperspace" (1989) (PDF)

 * The mushroom speaks to you when you speak to it. In the introduction to the book that my brother and I wrote (under pseudonyms) called Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, there is a mushroom monologue that begins: "I am old, fifty times older than thought in your species, and I came from the stars." Sometimes it's very human. My approach to it is Hasidic. I rave at it; it raves at me. We argue about what it is going to cough up and what it isn't. I say, "Well, look, I'm the propagator, you can't hold back on me," and it says, "But if I showed you the flying saucer for five minutes, you would figure out how it works," and I say, "Well, come through." It has many manifestations. Sometimes it's like Dorothy of Oz; sometimes it's like a very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker. I asked it once, "What are you doing on Earth?" It said, "Listen, if you're a mushroom, you live cheap; besides, I'm telling you, this was a very nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control."
 * "New Maps of Hyperspace" (1989) (PDF)

 * What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.
 * Trialogue #24: The Heavens Esalen, California (1992)

 * History is a set of nested resonances with each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it. This event horizon is like a series of ghost horizons, and once you enter into history, you enter into the outer shell of the temporal field of the attractor or the concrescence.
 * Approaching Timewave Zero Magical Blend Magazine (November 1994)

 * I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980, but I never knew what … how it would come or what it would be. In the last few years, with the rise of a technological, a cultural artefact like the Internet, I now see how it will make its way into the world. We are building the nervous system of the human oversoul. We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies … societies—human groups run by rules—into telepathic collectivities of some sort. … We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.
 * Light of the Third Millenium Chicago, 1996, 50m09s

 * For approximately 500 years, [science's] argument for its pre-eminence was that it could create beautiful toys: aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. But that is a fool's argument for truth! I mean, that's, after all, how a medicine show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better! This is not an entirely rational way to proceed.
 * The World and Its Double

 * We are being sucked into the body of eternity.
 * Terrence McKenna's "2012 Eternity" video

 * 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.
 * LSD - Terence Mckenna - The Purpose Of Psychedelics

 * It is now very clear that techniques of machine–human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage, imaging and retrieval techniques—all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture. … And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of a beige furnished fascism that won't even raise a ripple.
 * Non-Ordinary States Through Vision Plants (1988)

 * The Beliefs of a Witoto shaman and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal chance of being correct, and there are no arbiters of who is right. Here is something we have not assimilated. We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves, because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.
 * The Archaic Revival (1991)

 * Rod Dickinson: In fact, the whole phenomenon is more like a large collective work of art, involving circle-makers, investigators, the media, and just about anybody who comes into contact with the circles. It's a kind of mind virus: once you get involved, you can't get out. Terence McKenna: Absolutely. All these phenomena—UFOs, crop circles, even the cattle mutilation in the states—are all artifice in one form or another. All this stuff, these are fluctuations in the syntactical machinery of reality. The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.
 * Rod Dickinson and Terence McKenna: "Weird Shit Happens" (1995). First published in Performance Research Journal. An excerpt of the conversation can be found on the circlemakers.org website.

 * Novelty is density of connection. … We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of evolution (cultural and otherwise). I don't think so. I think we have been pulled here, that we are under the aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a "destiny", but what it is is a dream that is pulling us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster—that's the other thing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before the Industrial Revolution, for example—we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and continues to accelerate.
 * Talk at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC 25 April 1996

 * First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do as I wanted to do it, and it seemed to me—the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So it was to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero.
 * Talk at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC 25 April 1996

 * It's pretty simple, the ethical life—it's just demanding. … The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is—unless you're at Esalen—you should clothe the naked, you should feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, and there are a couple of other obvious things to be done. It's not about how many prostrations you do, or what lineage you've associated yourself with, or how much cholesterol is in your diet. And somehow, we have confused the ethical and moral dimension with the dimension of physical practices—probably because we have been too infected by the memes of tired Asian religions that long ago gave up moral philosophy in favor of rotational activity. Because the social problems of Asia are overwhelming. That's a response to an overwhelming human tragedy, the quietude of Asian religion, I think.
 * Appreciating Imagination (1997)

 * Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.
 * Shamanism and the Archaic Revival

 * A lot of people pass through the thinking I'm a guru and take enough trips to understand that no, I was just a witness. I was just a witness.
 * Tripzine.com interview with McKenna

 * I remember the very, very first time that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark, you might say, and I remember that this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of Dr. Hofmann's, I figured there were no surprises. So the only question I asked is, "How long does it last?" And he said, "About five minutes." So I did it, and … [long pause, audience cheers] There was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of, ah … beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they were doing was they were making objects come into existence by singing them into existence. Objects which looked like Fabergé eggs from Mars morphing themselves with Mandaean alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought a more elegant explanation would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt … and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said, "Don't think about it. Don't think about who we are … Think about doing what we're doing. Do it! Do it! Do it now!" And what they meant was, use your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf tykes jumping in and out of my chest; they like to do that to reassure you. And they said, "Do it." And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from English, and I began to speak …
 * "Alien Dreamtime" a multimedia event recorded live. (27 February 1993)

 * The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
 * "Alien Dreamtime" a multimedia event recorded live. (27 February 1993)

 * The view of science is that all processes ultimately run down, but entropy is maximized only in some far, far-away future. The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum are infinitely and linearly extendable into the future. In the spiral time scheme of the timewave, this assumption is not made. Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws that are conditioning existence and into another radically different set of laws. The universe is seen as a series of compartmentalized eras or epochs whose laws are quite different from one another, with transitions from one epoch to another occurring with unexpected suddenness.
 * True Hallucinations (1993)

 * Progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top down. No king, no parliament, no government ever extended to the people more rights than the people insisted upon. And I think we've come to a place with this psychedelic issue. And we have the gay community as a model, and all the other communities, the ethnic communities. We simply have to say, look, LSD has been around for fifty years now. We just celebrated the birthday. It ain't going away. We are not going away. We are not slack-jawed, dazed, glazed, unemployable psychotic creeps. We are pillars of society. You can't run your computers, your fashion houses, your publishing houses, your damn magazines, you can't do anything in culture without psychedelic people in key positions, and this is the great unspoken truth of American creativity. So I think it's basically time to just come out of the closet and go, "You know what, I'm stoned, and I'm proud."
 * "True Hallucinations" (1993)

 * If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
 * Re: Evolution (24 June 1994) This is derived from a statement of William Blake: "Truth cannot be told, so as to be understood, and not be believ'd."

 * We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination, you see it for what it's worth.
 * Eros and the Eschaton lecture (1994)

 * I'm not trying to sign people up to a creed. I'm much more interested in the people that disagree. These ideas are powerful, but this isn't mysticism in the ordinary sense, to be protected by mumblings about faith and all that. This is the real thing.
 * i-D magazine interview (1996)

 * For some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place. And what I mean by that is: there is no longer a commonality of understanding. I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers. Their next door neighbors may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor. … It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is that technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story—a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist post-McLuhanist electronic pre-apocalyptics existence. And so, into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality, rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions: epistemological cartoons, if you will. … Conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion … is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them, and then we can solve our technological problems? Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons, you know, it is kindergarten in the art of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying: that the real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. … Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control—the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody-or-others—but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. … Because this process which is underway will take the control-freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It's like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.
 * "Dreaming Awake at the End of Time" (13 December 1998) 11:30 – 15:29

 * What you see, I think, is the morphogenetic field. The invisible world that holds everything together. Not the net of matter and light, but the net of casuistry—of intentionality, of caring, of hope of dream—of thought. That all is there, but it has been hidden from us for centuries because of the exorcism of the spirit that took place in order to allow science to do business. And that monotonous and ill-considered choice has made us the inheritors of a tradition of existential emptiness. But that has impalded to us to go back to the jungles and recover this thing. … The question is: can we dream a dream that is sufficiently noble that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist? … I am convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no higher life, as we know it, on this planet. … We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body, it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening. And yet, we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern …
 * Audio lecture, "History Ends In Green" (Pt. 11 Pt. 12)

 * We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are—now—is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You're giving it all away to icons. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y … this is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told no, you're unimportant, you're peripheral—get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to 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.
 * Reclaim Your Mind, from the lecture "Eros and the Eschaton"

 * I think that people don't understand. As the Firesign Theater used to say, "Everything you know is wrong." But that is a very liberating understanding, because if everything you know is wrong, then all the problems you thought were insoluble can be framed differently. And there's a way to take the world apart and put it back unrecognizably. We don't really understand what consciousness is at the really deep levels. With some of the tryptamine hallucinogens, you see into possibilities where questions like "are you alive?", "are you dead?", "are you you?" seem to have been transcended. I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.
 * Spacetime Tsunami, Interview with Carla Sinclair, bOING bOING #10.

 * Thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations.
 * Quoted from an interview with Terence McKenna in How to be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

 * Where is it writ in adamantine, "The troops of monkeys should comprehend the architectonics of the cosmos"?

Psychedelic Society (1984)

 * From a speech given by Terence McKenna in 1984

 * What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance. And [I think] that beliefs should be put aside, and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems [in favor of] direct experience, and this is, I think, much of the problem of the modern dilemma, which is that direct experience has been discounted, and in its place, all kind of belief systems have been erected. … If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief.

 * Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, and what is lacking is the clear vision of what should be done. … What needs to be done is that fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new language, we must have a new reality. … A new reality will generate a new language, a new language will fix a new reality, and make it part of this reality.

 * I believe that liberation, or let's even say decency as a human quality, is an actual resonance and anticipation of this future perfected state of humanity. We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future, and no longer casting blame outward on institutions or hierarchies of responsibility and control, but by realizing the opportunities here, the responsibilities here, and the two may never be congruent again, and the salvation of your immortal soul may depend on what you do with the opportunity.

 * Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it"—in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.

 * Because too much we have lived in the light of the idea that your ideology will be dictated to you, essentially, by geography! And if you're born in India, you'll find out that the Cosmos is one way; if you're born in Brooklyn, you find out it's another way. What we need to do is transcend these localized grids of fate, which make us what we are but don't want to be.

 * History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

 * The psychedelics are a red-hot social issue, ethical issue, whatever the term for it is, and it is precisely because they are a deconditioning agents: they will cast doubt in you if you are a Hasidic rabbi, a Marxist anthropologist, or an altar boy, because their business is to dissolve belief systems, and they do this very well, and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience, what William James called, in infants, "the blooming, buzzing experience." And out of that, you reconstruct the world, and you need to understand that it is a dialog where your decisions, the projection of your grammar onto the intellectual space in front of you, is going to gel into the mode of being. We actually create our own universe because we are all operating with our own private languages.

 * We have numerous, extremely naïve assumptions built into our thinking, and our most venerable explanatory engines, such as science, happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines, and therefore they have built into them the most naïve and unexamined assumptions.

 * Yet science is going to tell you that the only things worth describing are those phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. This is being these are the only phenomena that science can describe, and that's the name of the game as far as they are concerned. But we, to claim our freedom, to take advantage of the tiny moment between immense abysses of unknowability, perhaps death, perhaps other reincarnations, perhaps transitions into other life forms, these things we don't know, but in the moment of being human we have the unique opportunity to figure things out. And I have the faith that it is possible, sometime, somewhere, to have a conversation, perhaps no progress will be made until the ninth hour, but to have a conversation in which reality could be literally pulled to pieces, beyond the point of reconstructing.

 * We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.

 * We must begin to send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them. We need to turn off the metaphorical televisions which are hooking us into the network of cultural assumptions dictated from the Pentagon and Madison Avenue and what-have-you. We need, instead, to turn on our terminals, and to begin to interact with like-minded people throughout the world and establish this new intellectual order, which will be then the salvation of mankind, I firmly believe—because it is a collectivity, and people will then feel the interrelatedness of their fates, feel the interrelatedness as a thing which transcends national divisions, ideological divisions, feel the primacy of being part of the human family.

Technopagans at the End of History (1998)

 * Terence McKenna & Mark Pesce, recorded at Esalen (August 1998)

 * I think we have to have character models built of ourselves, and turn the whole thing over to our writers; and we'll just go off to Tahiti, and the writers can—it's the "Uncle Duke" solution. If you can turn yourself into a cartoon character, you can retire, and a whole team of people will keep you au courant. … You know, I think the only way to keep your career going is to retire the "bod", and create an online character—a Saturday morning cartoon show apparently is where the action is.

 * It's strange—you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth.

 * Virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us; but once you grok it, it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of starflight and longevity extension, and so forth and so on, would also have a full VR toolkit under control. Well then, that means that when we go looking for the extraterrestrial, what will be the footprint? Perhaps vanished races are all around us, but downloaded into solid-state matrices that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize that possibility.

 * Mark mentioned the vector of virtual reality, nanotechnology, global communications—it's clear that we're moving toward, if not the Eschaton itself, then some kind of historical echo of it, in simulation, that, for all practical purposes, will be the same thing, as far as the impact it has on our lives. For example, you could doubt my much-vaunted prediction that the world will become unrecognizable by 2012; but do you doubt for a moment that by 2012, every major religion on Earth will have vast simulations of its eschatological vision for you to wander in and try out—so that you can look in on Nirvana.com, or lope over to the Celestial City, or look in on Sufi paradise? I mean, religious ontologies will be marketed like beers! And will be made as realistic and compelling as possible! Well, then, who is to say what is real and what is not? "Real" is a distinction of a naïve mind, I think. We're getting beyond that. I mean, naïve empiricism worked well enough, until the discoveries of quantum physics seventy or eighty years ago revealed the hideous secret that the bedrock of reality is a funhouse basement!

History Ends in Green (1983)

 * Excerpts from an eight-hour lecture in March 1993 discussing human cyclical history, its future attractor and ultimate dissolution.

 * Somewhere around 1945, we began to loot the future as a strategy for survival. Some ethical norm was shattered.

 * '''What's happening is that 8% of the world's people use 35% of the world's petroleum, and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way. This is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a mass scale. We're addicted, they got it, we're happy to pay for it, but if they won't sell it we'll break into their house and take it, because by God it will go into our right arm. That's the plan.

 * If we are all God's children, then why have we rigged the earth with dynamite and are flipping coins to see who gets to set it off?

 * We've been infected with the idea of original sin, that's what keeps us infantile … politics without responsibility is fascism.

 * The nightmare of every government on earth is a million people assembled in the town square of your capital city, demanding that you pack up to Switzerland. Nobody can say no to a million people on the streets.

 * You need an ego. If you didn't have an ego, you wouldn't know whose mouth to put food in when eating in a restaurant.

 * People had group values, because the children were group-owned. And that made a tremendous difference in the way the society imaged itself. People lived for the group, and in the core of the group were the children, and people always put them first. So everyone identified with the children, everybody was willing to face risk to preserve the younger gene-pool. This concern for male paternity is really a poisonous factor …

 * To my mind, this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.
 * Closing statement.

Global Perspectives and Psychedelic Poetics (1994)

 * A lecture and Q&A about psychedelics and society.

 * The psychedelic community has not yet recognized or named itself as a community. We are well behind gays and black people and all those other minorities … we are still trying to figure out if we are a community. And if we are a community, and we have a domain of action, I think where it lies—it's not that we are all supposed to become dope dealers, it's that we are all supposed to become artists; that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind. And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art-pedal to the floor, and understand that this is art—we are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western civilization, and, you know, it's been a C-minus performance so far … and they are just about to reach out with the hook and drag us offstage, unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously.

True Hallucinations (1994)

 * So where does this all leave us today? Did the cosmic giggle move on? … It was easy to look back and to tell this story as if it were a completed cycle, something finished and resplendent in its completion. The problem with that approach is that this story is true, its actors real people, their lives ongoing. … My colleagues, my friends and lovers, have changed and moved on. Different fates have claimed each of us. … The only person who was part of the original team to whom I feel I can still rave at full bore with concerning the experiment at La Chorrera is Dennis. … He is now the scientist that at La Chorrera he could only aspire to be. … He tolerates my raving but is careful never to encourage me. … Because the major idea to emerge out of this experience is the timewave and the computer software that supports it, I am in the absurd position of being either an unsung Newton or completely nuts. …  Do I have the winds of history blowing at my back and really did befriend the Logos and learn the secret of the universe, or at least one of many secrets, in the chaos at La Chorrera? I honestly confess that I do not know.  As I write these words, my marriage to Kat of nearly sixteen years seems caught up in a process of dissolution painful to both of us. This despite our two children, the house we built together, and both our efforts to be decent people. Apparently the presence of the Logos has done nothing to mitigate or ward off the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Like the Soul in Yeats's poem I am still an eternal thing fastened to the body of a dying animal. …  I am assured by the people around me—publishers, editors, agents, marketing experts—people who are obviously uninformed as to the whispered promise of a special destiny made to me by the elves of hyperspace, that I am going to be big, have influence, and change the way people think.  Perhaps this will be true. I hope so. Something happened at La Chorrera, something extraordinary. I was extremely fortunate to have briefly glimpsed a strange, beautiful, and better sort of world and to have made a marvelous pact with the alien gods who dwell there. …  My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.

Art Bell show (Coast to coast AM)

 * ... yes I mean these journies into higher places, where-ever they are, seem to demand mathematical metaphors ...

  - 19 March 1997''
 * ... the way I interpret the material you deal with Art, the weird experiences, and the ideas people generate out of it, and the public attention to all that, is that something is trying to be told, the universe is trying to reach us ...

 * ... intuition is intuition, & noise is noise, so what you do is, cook it in your mind and go with what feels right

 - March 1998
 * ... Arabian hyper-space ... (discussing DMT, & finding his own quotes on the Internet)

Quotes about McKenna

 * There was one oft-repeated McKenna-ism that resonated particularly strongly with me, uttered during a seemingly casual conversation about crop circles that was subsequently published online: "The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art." For some reason that wasn't entirely clear (it still isn't), when I first read this simple sentence, something about it shook me and left me shaking. Like one of the Grand Pronouncements from the Upanishads, it seemed to import some deep and profound truth about our reality—if only I could get at it and make sense of it.
 * Andrew R. Gallimore: Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game. Strange Worlds Press, 2019.
 * Gallimore cites the 1995 conversation "Weird Shit Happens" between Rod Dickinson and Terence McKenna, which was first published in Performance Research Journal. An excerpt of the conversation can be found on the circlemakers.org website.

 * Perhaps the old adage about the impossibility of dismantling the master's house with the master's tools applies here, and Western psychotherapy needs a deeper disruption from outside of its own walls. There are plenty of Indigenous notions of interconnectedness that could gainfully subvert our individualistic models. There has been an inchoate call in the conference presentations of many psychedelic researchers to open ourselves up to Indigenous wisdom as our culture's use of psychedelics enters its turbulent adolescence. Maybe this is the lesson we most urgently need to learn at this juncture. The time is now, since, in the words of psychedelic psychotherapy-skeptic Terence McKenna, "we don't want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis, but that is the way we may well be headed.... We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma."
 * Bill Brennan, Psychedelic Justice (2021)

 * Terence's pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened, and I don't know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe. It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning." And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.  Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence's worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming.
 * Dennis McKenna: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (unpublished manuscript)

 * Surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom "is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind" is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties.
 * Judy Corman, vice president of Phoenix House of New York, a drug treatment center, in a letter to The New York Times in 1993, as quoted in "Terence McKenna, 53, dies; Patron of psychedelic drugs" by Douglas Martin, The New York Times (April 9, 2000)

 * A cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of its cognitive Kansas.
 * Tom Robbins about Terence McKenna's book Archaic Revival (1992)

Tom Robbins: Regrettably, Terence and I never discussed this notion specifically, but my sense is that he was getting at something more profound than are the texturalists, who contend that nothing ever written matters or even exists outside of the text: the actual words an author has put down on the page. And likewise more profound than Wittgenstein, who famously said, "All I know is what I have words for." '''What seems likely is that Terence was not only contending that the universe is a genetic, extra-dimensional, interspecies verbal construct, but that it exists primarily as a result of our consciousness of it. What he may actually have been implying is, "the world is made of imagination." '''There is, after all, a possibility that when it comes to consensual reality, we're making it up. All of it. And language is the universal medium by which we identify and explain our creation to ourselves. Language lends reality to reality. I do recall hearing Terence say once that everything in nature has stories to tell; not just scientific information to impart, mind you, but something akin to plot-line narration, if one is equipped to "read" it.
 * Tony Vigorito: Terence McKenna was fond of saying that the world is made of language. As a master wordsmith and a personal friend of Terence, what do you take this notion to mean?
 * Tom Robbins and Tony Vigorito, in "The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins" (2012) in Reality Sandwich

title: Terence McKenna


text: User:Krischik

title: User:Krischik


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User:Toby Bartels

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title: User:Toby Bartels