[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

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

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.

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

Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.