The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.

All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.

When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

I don't explain-I explore.

Casting my perils before swains.

Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

Headlines are icons, not literature.

We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.

The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press.

Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.

The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.

Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.

We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.

Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.

Environment is process, not container.

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

To the blind all things are sudden.

The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.

Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.

The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers.

Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.

My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world. "Education, Language, and Media". Cycle 7, 1973, p. 232

The most human thing about us is our technology.

The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.