First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual."
"Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts."
"New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown."
"Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech."
"Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing."
"The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves."
"We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology."
"The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own."
"Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual."
"By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth."
"Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering."
"Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure."
"We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information."
"As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body."
"When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state."
"The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge."
"While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)"
"Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication. (p. 23)"
"The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. (p. 31)"
"Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. (p. 33)"
"Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)"
"The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)"
"There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)"
"The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)"
"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)"
"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)"
"The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)"
"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)"
"All advertising advertises advertising β no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)"
"Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)"
"Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)"
"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)"
"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)"
"All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)"
"Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)"
"Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)"
"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 is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)"
"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)"
"Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)"
"Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)"
"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)"
"I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)"
"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)"
"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 mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)"
"The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)"