The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.

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.

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

One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.

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

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

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.

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.

Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

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.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

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

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.

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.

Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.

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.

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.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

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.

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

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

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

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

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

The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.

Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.

The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.

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.

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.