The objective of advertising is the manipulation, exploitation, and control of the individual.

The future holds for us a corporate man who will accept the goldfish bowl as a natural habitat—having recognized that electronic espionage has already become an art form.

As with [the] movie, the book reader seems to enter into himself and to create a world of privacy and isolation.

We can say confidently that change is the only stable form we possess. At high speeds, it becomes like a self-regulating gyrostabilizer – a steadying form. And the faster we move, the more surely we’re moving toward an absolutely static society.

Like Coleridge's Mariner, they [the early Symbolists] were the first that ever burst into that silent sea. This was the world of experience emerging to Keats when he spoke of "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faene lands forlorn." It was to be a world in which the eye listens, the ear sees, and in which all the senses assist each other in concert.

Already it is becoming clear that the main “work” of the future will be education, that people will not so much earn a living as learn a living. Close to 30 million people in the U.S. are now pursuing some form of adult education, and the number shoots skyward. Industry and the military, as well as the arts and sciences, are beginning to consider education their main business.

No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

Can we view this future, the hard and fast of it? Never, for it will always come around a corner we never noticed, take us by surprise. But studying the future helps us toward understanding the present.

The structure of our churches is obsolesced by the multi-directional media speaker system, and the older distance between speaker and audience is gone.

… one can see the matter in parallel form in the discovery by the preacher that the microphone is incompatible with vehement exhortation or stern admonition. To a public that is electronically participant in a completely acoustic situation, loudspeakers bring the sounds of the preacher from several directions at once. The structure of our churches is obsolesced by the multi-directional media speaker system, and the older distance between speaker and audience is gone. The audience is now in immediate relation with the speaker, a factor which also turns the celebrant around to face the congregation. These major aspects of liturgical change were unforeseen and unplanned and remain unacknowledged by the users of the microphone system in our churches

Change is the only stable form we possess.

The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.

The computer will create large amounts of leisure time for the employed. It will also create for the unemployed on extended welfare time to participate in electronic politics.

The Beatles do this. They are a group of people who suddenly were able to put on their audience and the English language with musical effects—putting on a whole vesture, a whole time, a Zeit.

Whenever you meet the unfamiliar, you at once translate it into something you already know, and that means you never contact the unfamiliar. It's not safe.

Today, our inner life is itself a world of simultaneous relationships. The subconscious, the dream world, is a world wherein we possess all past knowledge of the race. We possess it all simultaneously, and of this we’re completely unconscious because you can’t be conscious of the simultaneous.

The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electrically, you begin to create a subconscious outside. Until recently, the conscious was our environment; now the subconscious has become our environment.

Reading and writing in this respect represent an intense degree of specialization of experience. Writing meant that the acoustic world with its magic power over the being of things was arrested and banished to a humble sphere. Writing meant the power of fixing the flux of words and of thought. Writing permitted analysis of thought-processes which gave rise to the categories of knowledge. With writing came the power of visually enclosing not only acoustic space but architectural space. With writing came the separation of music from the dance, of both from words. Before writing, all these divisions were merged in a single “mythic” knowledge, a single rhythm where there was no present but all was now. FOUR QUARTETS of T. S. Eliot is a complete guide to our own recovery of acoustic modes of knowing our own and past experience. FINNEGANS WAKE of James Joyce is a verbal universe in which press, movie, radio, TV merge with the languages of the world to form a Feenichts Playhouse of metamorphoses.