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.

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

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

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

Language is a form of organized stutter.

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.

Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration - the technique of the suspended judgement.

Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

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

Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African.

Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

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

Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

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.

Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.

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

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

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

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

If Mormonism is able to endure, unmodified, until it reaches the third and fourth generation, it is destined to become the greatest power the world has ever known.

The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.

When a person inflates his own importance, he does not see his own sins; and his sins get bigger right along with him.

Memento mori-remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die-what makes this any different from a half hour?

It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person's pride.

People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing-refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.

When a person is haughty, he distances himself from other people and thereby deprives himself of one of life's biggest pleasures-open, joyful communication with everyone.

Wealth is a great sin in the eyes of God. Poverty is a great sin in the eyes of man.

What is the Jew?...What kind of unique creature is this whom all the rulers of all the nations of the world have disgraced and crushed and expelled and destroyed; persecuted, burned and drowned, and who, despite their anger and their fury, continues to live and to flourish. What is this Jew whom they have never succeeded in enticing with all the enticements in the world, whose oppressors and persecutors only suggested that he deny (and disown) his religion and cast aside the faithfulness of his ancestors?! The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity.