What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.
Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn’t necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else’s affairs.
The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.
Fish did not discover water.
The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.
Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.
The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.
Any breakdown is a breakthrough.
Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.
One matter Englishmen don’t think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.
To say that “the camera cannot lie” is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.
I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.
There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for “content” are illusioned.