Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

The "interface" of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism - a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.

Every technology contrived and "outered" by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.

The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view."

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system.

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.

Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.

The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.

The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.

Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe.

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and "closure" of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.

Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the "content," which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.

Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.

The compassionate are not rich; therefore, the rich are not compassionate.

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.

It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person's pride.

When a person is haughty, he distances himself from other people and thereby deprives himself of one of life's biggest pleasures-open, joyful communication with everyone.

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life-becoming a better person.

"He who exalts himself shall be humbled; and he who humbles himself shall be exalted." (Matthew 23:12) The person who exalts himself ... will be humbled, because a person who considers himself to be good, intelligent, and kind will not even try to become better, smarter, kinder. The humble person will be exalted, because he considers himself bad and will try to become better, kinder, and more reasonable.

The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.

In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.

Memento mori-remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?