Great Throughts Treasury

"Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen."

"Casting my perils before swains."

"Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote."

"Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands."

"Computers can do better than ever what needn?t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly."

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

"Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds."

"Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors."

"Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world."

"Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it."

"Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space."

"Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval."

"Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress."

"Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another."

"Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means."

"Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?"

"Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinesthesia, or sound, can the eye see."

"Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it."

"Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life."

"Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner."

"Education is civil defense against media fallout."

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always precede causes in the actual developmental order."

"Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously."

"Electrically speaking, there's nothing but nuzzling and cuddling and cooing, alternating with wild yells for love and food and help. It's always May Day in the global nursery."

"Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves."

"Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes."

"Environment is process, not container."

"Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception."

"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally."

"Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press."

"Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things."

"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."

"Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience."

"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."

"Every technology contrived and ?outered? by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization."

"Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus ? the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size."

"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."

"Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody."

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."

"Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man."

"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."

"First we build the tools, then they build us."

"For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient."

"For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."

"For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning."

"For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder."

"Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts."

"Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning."

"Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist."

"Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped."