"Always judge your fellow passengers to be the opposite of what they strive to appear to be. For instance, a military man is not quarrelsome, for no man doubts his courage; but a snob is. A clergyman is not over strait- laced, for his piety is not questioned; but a cheat is. A lawyer is not apt to be argumentative; but an actor is. A woman that is all smiles and graces is a vixen at heart : snakes fascinate. A stranger that is obsequious and over-civil without apparent cause is treacherous: cats that purr are apt to bite and scratch. Pride is one thing, assumption is another; the latter must always get the cold shoulder, for whoever shews it is no gentleman: men never affect to be what they are, but what they are not. The only man who really is what he appears to be is — a gentleman."

"I want you to see Peel, Stanley, Graham, Sheil, Russell, Macaulay, Old Joe, and soon. They are all upper-crust here."

"It seems to me, all created critters look down on each other. The British and French look down on the s, and colonists look down upon s and Indians, while we look down upon them all. It's the way of the world, I do suppose; but the road ain't a pleasant one."

"Nineteen forty-five marked the nadir of Western Civilization."

"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)"

"The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”"

"Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)"

"We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)"

"Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. (p. 113)"

"The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)"

"Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds. (p. 72)"

"The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)"

"The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."

"For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)"

"The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)"

"The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (p. 8)"

"Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)"

"The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)"

"The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free. (88)"

"One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)"

"The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.” (p. 204)"

"The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)"

"All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. (p. 199)"

"Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)"

"The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)"

"One touch of nature makes the whole world tin."

"War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)"

"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)"

"The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)"

"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)"

"Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)"

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

"Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries. (p. 24)"

"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)"

"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)"

"In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)"

"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..."

"Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)"

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

"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."

"Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)"

"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)"