Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold, the compelling aura of it disappeared.

pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in Babylonian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures represents an extension of the visual sense for storing and expediting access to human experience.

Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that produces empire and expansion.

For just as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media.

the beholding of idols, or the use of technology, conforms men to them.

Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies.

how do whole communities act when conquered and enslaved? The same strategy serves them as it does the lame individual in a society of warriors. They specialize and become indispensable to their masters.

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.