Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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.

Women do not win formula one races, because they simply are not strong enough to resist the G-forces. In the boardroom, it is different. I believe women are better able to marshal their thoughts than men and because they are less egotistical they make fewer assumptions.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Every private in the French army carries a Field Marshall wand in his knapsack.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

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.

The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

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

The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

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

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Jokes are grievances.

The real news is bad news.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

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

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

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

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.

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

We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.

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.

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

The world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason. What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author's control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with Beethoven's Symphonies, with Adam Smith's ''Wealth of Nations'' -- with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love them because you say, ''These things were not made, they were seen.''

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

Maybe i should put a bucket over my head and a marshmallow in each ear and stumble around for another dum-dum week for another hum-drum hit song to appear...

Marshmellow Peeps? Bad for you... bad for the earth... bad bad bad.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America-not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.