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.

The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

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

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

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

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

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.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

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 message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

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 business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

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

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

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

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and "closure" of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.

Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

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

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.

Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

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

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

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

Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the "content," which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

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

Human perception is literally incarnation.

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.

Art is anything you can get away with.

The mother tongue is propaganda.

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.

America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.