The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66) - Marshall McLuhan

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment — of what's really going on — affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.

The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)

Either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality.