Harold Innis Quotes

#1. Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers.

Harold Innis

#2. Industrialism implies technology and the cutting of time into precise fragments suited to the needs of the engineer and the accountant.

Harold Innis

#3. The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.

Harold Innis

#4. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.

Harold Innis

#5. The history of Canada has been profoundly influenced by the habits of an animal which very fittingly occupies a prominent place on her coat of arms.

Harold Innis

#6. The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine, has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication. Their entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.

Harold Innis

#7. Democracy will defeat the economist at every turn on its own genre.

Harold Innis

#8. We have not yet realized that the Indian and his culture were fundamental to the growth of Canadian institutions.

Harold Innis

#9. The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.

Harold Innis

#10. The discovery of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century implied the beginning of a return to a type of civilization dominated by the eye rather than the ear.

Harold Innis

#11. The diversity of institutions has made possible the combination of government ownership and private enterprise which has been a further characteristic of Canadian development. Canada has remained fundamentally a product of Europe.

Harold Innis

#12. Graham Wallas has reminded us that writing as compared with speaking involves an impression at the second remove and reading an impression at the third remove. The voice of a second-rate person is more impressive than the published opinion of superior ability.

Harold Innis