"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. (p. 362)"

"The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)"

"The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)"

"The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)"

"The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)"

"The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)"

"In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground. (p. 314)"

"I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)"

"Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)"

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)"

"Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)"

"Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)"

"The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. (p. 275)"

"Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)"

"There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)"

"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. (p. 256)"

"Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)"

"Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)"

"All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)"

"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. (p. 201)"

"With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)"

"People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)"

"Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)"

"Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)"

"All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)"

"Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry? (p. 141)"

"The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)"

"Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? (p. 121-125)"

"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. (p. 105)"

"What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. (p. 36)"

"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."

"The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action."

"The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts."

"Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world."

"Human perception is literally incarnation."

"Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since."

"Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press."

"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods."

"Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception."

"For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."

"Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes."

"Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment."

"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result."

"New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media."

"The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces."

"My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant."