A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

In Russia, writers with serious grievances are arrested, while in America they are merely featured on television talk shows, where all that is arrested is their development.

Public schooling does not serve a public; it creates a pubic.

Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.