Harold Innis Quotes

#1. The task of understanding a culture built on the oral tradition is impossible to students steeped in the written tradition. p.55

Harold A. Innis

#2. Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet would cost about $20 billion. Let's just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.

Jim Wallis

#3. 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

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

Harold Innis

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

Harold Innis

#6. One of the nicest satisfactions you can have is to be able to give something back to your parents when they've given so much to you.

Dwight Gooden

#7. When people say to me: would you rather be thought of as a funny man or a great boss? My answer's always the same, to me, they're not mutually exclusive.

David

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Harold Innis

#12. I'm restless, bored, and invisible. A dangerous thing for any woman to be.

Karen Marie Moning

#13. I never set out to beat the world. I just set out to do my absolute best.

Al Oerter

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

Harold Innis

#15. I was very immersed in the world. I'm very worldly. I love world. I was immersed in my career, in school, in teaching.

Frederick Lenz

#16. 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

#17. The Agna, liberating instructions of the 'Gnani' [the enlightened one], purifies the mind. Knowledge of the Self [self realization] will give the mind, solutions in every circumstance.

Dada Bhagwan

#18. Man is too quick at forming conclusions.

Edward E. Barnard

#19. the unexpected moment [is] always sweeter.

Julia Quinn

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they're] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.

Gloria Steinem

#24. Controlling the mind is the way to attain internal harmony.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#25. The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

Antonio Damasio

#26. What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

J. William Fulbright

#27. Look, miracles in the Middle East are a reality.

Ehud Olmert

#28. Life was brutal for her. She hated the heat and the dust - the lack of friendship and lack of respect from other women
who knew she was a Christian. She hated the monster my father had become.

Brian Arthur Levene