Marshall McLuhan

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)

We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)

The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)

We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 9)

All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. (p. 199)

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)

Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)