Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

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 hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

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.

At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.

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.

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.

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been...destroyed by sudden environmental change.

The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world. "Education, Language, and Media". Cycle 7, 1973, p. 232

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.

I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.

The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.

Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.

When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

I don't explain-I explore.

Casting my perils before swains.

Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

Headlines are icons, not literature.

We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.

The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.

By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press.

Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.