Quote collection
376 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment."
"The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions."
"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."
"Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage."
"At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential."
"Today, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions."
"You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources."
"Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws."
"Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity."
"In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same."
"The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts."
"I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant."
"The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes."
"Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols."
"Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience."
"Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments."
"In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses."
"Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time."
"The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation."