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.

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.

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

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.

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

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.

The "interface" of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism - a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.

Every technology contrived and "outered" by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

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.

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.

The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a "point of view."

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.

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

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.