"When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments. (p. 180)"

"Tactility is space of the interval."

"Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)"

"Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment."

"The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system."

"The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz."

"The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism."

"As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove."

"Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended."

"Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen."

"Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium."

"The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence."

"In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)"

"Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature. (p. 11)"

"By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)"

"Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. (p. 106)"

"Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size. (p. 6)"

"New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)"

"Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. (p. 63)"

"Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)"

"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.""