"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. (p. 84)"

"Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)"

"Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete. (p. 99)"

"Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)"

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. (p. 132)"

"PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. “LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,” she said. “Likewise McLuhan.” Do you see any similarities?"

"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."

"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. The less identity, the more violence."

"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."

"You don't like those ideas? I got others!"

"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. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere." (p.9-10)"

"The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (p.45)"

"Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom. (p.77)"

"All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness."

"Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. (p.99)"

"Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. (p.202)"

"World War I was a railway war of centralism and encirclement. World War II was a radio war of decentralism. World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)"

"The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem."

"Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information."

"The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus."

"Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins."