Great Throughts Treasury

"Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes."

"New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers."

"Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society."

"Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since."

"Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training."

"Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance."

"Older clich‚s are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground."

"One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system."

"Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment."

"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly."

"Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses."

"Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension."

"Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning."

"One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast."

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with."

"One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor."

"One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in."

"Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic."

"One touch of nature makes the whole world tin."

"Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete."

"Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumors, not by coverage."

"Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind."

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."

"Our permanent address is tomorrow."

"People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath."

"Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant."

"People never remember but the computer never forgets."

"People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies."

"Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy."

"Percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of nature."

"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."

"Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode ? a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground."

"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."

"Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography."

"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."

"Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks."

"Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been... destroyed by sudden environmental change."

"Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made ?bad grammar? possible."

"Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism."

"Primitivism has become the vulgar clich‚ of much modern art and speculation."

"Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such."

"Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries."

"Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture."

"Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama."

"Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man."

"Publication is a self-invasion of privacy."

"Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes?"

"Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?"

"Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons."

"Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge."