All Quotes

"Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage. (p. 92)"

"Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)"

"Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p. 114)"

"The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. (p. 152)"

"World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts. (p. 152)"

"The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)"

"In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. (p. 211)"

"The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore."

"At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years."

"Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension."

"Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces."

"Invention is the mother of all necessities."

"Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see."

"At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant."

"TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events."

"The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."

"All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody."

"Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man."

"Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity."

"The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light."

"The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas."

"The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film."

"The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer."

"Boyoboy oboyoboy oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy..."

"[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.""

"The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation."

"Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity."

"The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community."

"I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world."

"For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient."

"All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation."

"By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds."

"Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture."

"Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning."

"[Youth] is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines."

"My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches [things] I had done...and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world."

"It's sapiens to be homo."

"'Brutality!' cried Tristam. The class was at last interested. 'Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.'"

"‘…I prefer to think of [young women] less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.’"

"‘So she was Greek, was she?’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Well, well. I suppose the new vice laws are driving some of them out of Soho. Driving them down here,’ he said, as though a whole new world were opening up. ‘Well.’"

"‘She is a goddess,’ said Ambrose, drunkenly and stoutly. ‘…And she wants me. She’s the pursuer…She’s the epitome of woman, not,’ he said, ‘not a second-hand bundle of coy erogeneity draped,’ he said, ‘in an all-too-diaphanous robe,’ he said, ‘of pudeur.’"

"‘…today’s…newspapers…full of…diminishing exports, the unkillable widening grin of the pullulating East, the expanding machine of the almighty infallible State….He himself could only turn to the past, but he heard that it was already possible to change the past, bringing the past perpetually up to date, a perpetual jackal fawning on the present, a malleable witness with no qualms about perjury. He knew that the armies were on the march, the Tannoys blaring, the collective mind – tool of oligarchy – being fashioned under the anaesthetic of the catchphrase and the mass entertainment...’"

"It was all a matter of a Goddess – dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable."

"There he lieth, tossing in the guilt of his lewdness, the primal lecher, neglectful of his duties to a fair wife but all too ready to plunge his sizzling steel into the slaking black mud of a base Indian."

"I am near the end of the wine, sweet lords and lovely ladies, but out there the big wine is being poured – thin, slow, grey. Never more shall I taste the oncoming of this particular darkness. But I shall not be sorry to go. I am not seduced by the dainty lusts, clothed in cold green and clean linen, of an English spring. If you plunge into that dark there you will emerge at length into a raging sun and all the fabled islands of my East. And that is what I shall be doing tonight, off like a bird. I see you have your pennies ready, ladies. Twitch not, hop not about nor writhe so: I shall not be long now."

"The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)"

"Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. (p. 33)"

"The percept takes priority of the concept."

"Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)"

"The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)"