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.

Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.

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.

My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

To the blind all things are sudden.

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.

Casting my perils before swains.

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.

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.

The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

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

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

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.

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