Marshall McLuhan

In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.

Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space.

Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

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..

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.

African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.

Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.

Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.