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.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.

I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.

The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.

America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.

Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.