My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

With the arrival of electric technology, man has 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 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.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.

Art is anything you can get away with.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

An expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. 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. Any expensive ad is as carefully built on the tested foundations of public stereotypes or 'sets' of established attitudes, as any skyscraper is built on bedrock.

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...

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artist? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happem 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....

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

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.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-perso n, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener

Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.

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.

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 only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.