"Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man." (Olaf Stapledon, "Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future", 1930)
"Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media, 1964)
"Deception, in a system of this sort, can be defined simply as entropy [...] And of course, entropy, or degradation of order, is avoided by all civilized beings, since no local increase in complexity can offset entropic effects in the larger matrix." (James Tiptree Jr, "Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion" ["Parimutuel Planet"], Galaxy, 1969)
"Thought is a matrix which engenders its own reality. The ideas, concepts, belief-systems that your ancestors trapped have become your trap." (Alfred A Attanasio, "Radix", 1981)
"As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day." (Margaret Atwood, "The Handmaid’s Tale", 1986)
"Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)
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