medium quotes

Derived fromthe wordsTerribleVaudeville† We call it a medium because nothing's well done.

- Goodman Ace
  Of  T V. Letter to Groucho Marx. Collected in The Groucho Letters (1967).

Dress is a form of visual art, a creation of images with the visible self as its medium.

- Anne Hollander
  Seeing Through Clothes, ch.5.

   Science is the reduction of the bewildering diversity of unique events to manageable uniformity within one of a number of symbol systems, and technology is the art of using thesesymbol systemssoastocontrol and organize unique events. Scientific observation is always a viewing of things through the refracting medium of a symbol system, and technological praxis is always handling of things in ways that some symbol system has dictated. Education in science and technology is essentially education on the symbol level.

- Aldous Leonard Huxley
  In Daedalus, spring issue.

The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.

- Michael Ignatieff
  'Is Nothing Sacred?  The Ethics of  Television', in Daedalus: Journal of the American  Academy of  Arts and Sciences, Fall.

The medium is the message.

- (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan
  Speech at the University of British Columbia, 30  Jun, following a symposium in Vancouver on the subject of music and the mass media. The phrase was later used as the title of ch.1in Understanding Media (1964), and as a book title (1969).

Man is not the enemy of Man, but through the medium of a false system of government.

-Thomas Paine
^2  The Rights of Man.

   The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

- Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray, preface.