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

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

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

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

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.

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.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

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

The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.