"If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat. (p. 31)"

"We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 9)"

"It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)"

"It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour."

"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)"

"The medium is the message."

"There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits..."

"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.""

"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 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."

"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 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)"

"Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)"

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

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

"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)"

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

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

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

"Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible. (p. 263)"

"Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixations of languages. (p. 260)"

"Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)"

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

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

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

"The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)"

"The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare. (p. 230)"

"Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)"

"The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)"

"Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)"

"Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)"

"Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)"

"Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)"

"The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)"

"The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)"

"Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)"

"The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)"

"Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (p. 186)"

"Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. (p. 183)"

"Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)"

"With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)"

"Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)"

"Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)"

"The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture. (p. 170)"

"Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)"

"The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)"

"Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)"

"Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)"