All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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

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

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

People never remember but the computer never forgets.

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.

Headlines are icons, not literature.

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.

We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth.

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

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

Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

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

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

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.

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

The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.

A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?

Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

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.

I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.

Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

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 percept takes priority of the concept.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

Environment is process, not container.

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.

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.

The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers.

The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.

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

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

Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

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

After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

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.

I don't explain-I explore.

Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.

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

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.