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

Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.

Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.

There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.

The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.

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.

The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

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.

The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.

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.

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.

Logic is figure without a ground.

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.

There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.

The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.

The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche.

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.

When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.

The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.

The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal.

Language is a sense, like touch.

Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.

Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.

Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.

I am a pattern watcher.

The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.

The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.