War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.

We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

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

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.

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.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

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.

One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds.

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

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.

Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus - the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.

New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.

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.

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.

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.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

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.

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.

The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody.

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.

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.