Innis's work, despite its maddeningly obscure, opaque and elliptical character, is the great achievement in communications on this continent. In The Bias of Communication, Empire and Communications, Changing Concepts of Time and in the essays on books on the staples that dominated the Canadian economy, Innis demonstrated a natural depth, excess, and complexity, a sense of paradox and reversal that provides permanent riddles rather than easy formulas. His texts continue to yield because they combine, along with studied obscurity, a gift for pungent aphorism, unexpected juxtaposition, and sudden illumination. Opening his books is like reengaging an extended conversation: they are not merely things to read but things to think with.
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James W. Carey, (1992) Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society p.142.Harold Innis
Innis made the study of technology and civilization (Canada as a big "staples commodity") an opportunity for the development of a distinctive Canadian way of thinking. In the Innisian world of technological realism, there emerges an epistemological toolkit for the exploration of dependency and emancipation as the two faces of technological society. Innis's thought is perfectly styled to the historical specificity of Canada's political economy and culture because it is a constant reflection on the great tension between centre/periphery in Canada's historical formation.
Harold Innis
It is easy to criticize Innis's negativism and his encouragement of an apolitical stance for the intellectual in society. But to see only the negative side of his outlook --- his economic determinism, relativism, and apoliticism --- is to miss a positive central thread that runs through his work, from the investigation of the fur staple to his defence of scholarship, and later, his explorations in the biases of communications: to understand limits is to enhance the freedom of the nation and the individual.
Harold Innis
There is nothing willful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowlege. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight … Innis makes no effort to "spell out" the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits...
Marshall McLuhan
I tend to keep books of art more than anything else now. I'm interested in visual things. And astronomy books. Things you can look at over and over and over again and see something new. ... My notions of God and the universe have always been too small. And limited by language. So now I'm looking at picture books. My children say I'm just beginning to enter my dotage: can't read, just looks at picture books.
Robert Fulghum
Many Christians base the belief of a soul and God upon the Bible. Strictly speaking, there is no such book. To make the Bible, sixty-six books are bound into one volume. These books are written by many people at different times, and no one knows the time or the identity of any author. Some of the books were written by several authors at various times. These books contain all sorts of contradictory concepts of life and morals and the origin of things. Between the first and the last nearly a thousand years intervened, a longer time than has passed since the discovery of America by Columbus.
Clarence Darrow
Innis, Harold
Inouye, Daniel
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