Quote collection
376 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction."
"If it works, it's obsolete."
"Fish did not discover water."
"With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."
"The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty."
"Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials."
"The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound."
"Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure."
"The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure."
"We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies."
"Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product."
"As a rule, I always look for what others ignore."
"Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man."
"When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems."
"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man."
"The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing."
"It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it"
"The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability."
"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods."
"The most human thing about us is our technology."