Quote collection
376 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties."
"The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling."
"One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor."
"Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression."
"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."
"The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive."
"Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture."
"When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result."
"New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature."
"Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity."
"The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces."
"Technology is that which separates us from our environment."
"Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both."
"Electronic man has no physical body."
"Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity."
"Only the vanquished remember history."
"The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature..."
"Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening. ... The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village."
"The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb."
"...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph."