The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Never promise more than you can perform.

No one should be judge in his own cause.

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.

As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.

When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.

The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.

While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.

The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment.

Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.

Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.

There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.

The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.

When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total.

The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

Logic is figure without a ground.

Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind.

There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.

Language is a sense, like touch.

Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.

Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.

Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.

I am a pattern watcher.

The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.

The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is.

The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal.

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.

The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche.

War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.

We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness.

All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.