Great Throughts Treasury

"Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language."

"Headlines are icons, not literature."

"Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table."

"Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave."

"Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities."

"Human perception is literally incarnation."

"History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order."

"Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electro-technical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature."

"I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world."

"I am a pattern watcher."

"I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties."

"I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing."

"I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs."

"I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what?s happening. Because I don?t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you?re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I?m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons."

"I don't explain?I explore."

"I don't pretend to understand my stuff. After all, my writing is very difficult."

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."

"I don't know who discovered water but it certainly wasn't a fish."

"I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."

"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."

"If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting."

"If it works, it's obsolete."

"If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch."

"If the temperature in the bathtub is raised only one degree every ten minutes, how does the bather know when to start screaming?"

"If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire."

"I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man?s destiny ? if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image ? tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I?ve tried to demonstrate in my examination of the post-literate culture, the story begins only when the book closes."

"I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt."

"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."

"In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses."

"In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground."

"In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not neutral or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground."

"If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly aquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and ?closure? of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.?"

"In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud."

"In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit."

"In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession."

"In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood."

"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin."

"In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point."

"In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man?s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations."

"In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness."

"Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition."

"Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes."

"Inter-determinacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities."

"Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch."

"Invention is the mother of all necessities."

"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. It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there."

"In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by disc."

"It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds."

"It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic."