"The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)"

"The percept takes priority of the concept."

"Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance."

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

"Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov --- what if he is right?"

"Art is anything you can get away with."

"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."

"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. (p. 384)"

"Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"

"The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie."

"Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)"

"Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)"

"The digital divide is alive and growing stronger. This reality has made it imperative not to lose sight of the political economic infrastructures of media technologies and certainly never to take McLuhan's metaphors too literally."

"Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation. (p. 288)"

"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."

"War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)"

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

"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)"

"Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)"

"The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age."

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

"Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)"

"The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)"

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

"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 sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)"

"The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)"

"Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols."

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

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

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

"The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)"

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

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

"The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.""

"The media have substituted themselves for the older world."

"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)"

"By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)"

"Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)"

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

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

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

"The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)"

"Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)"

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

"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)"

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

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

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

"The uniformity and repeatability of print created the “political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the “hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth. (p. 237)"