"One ought to be ashamed to make use of the wonders of science embodied in a radio set, the while appreciating them as little as a cow appreciates the botanic marvels in the plants she munches." (Albert Einstein, [remarks opening the Seventh German Radio Exhibition at Berlin] 1930)
"Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962)
"Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the content, which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)
"If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly aquire new meanings and different textures... and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and closure of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)
"Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)
"The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)
"To the optical astronomer, radio data serves like a good dog on a hunt." (Fred Hoyle, "Galaxies, Nuclei and Quasars". 1965)
"The important prediction is not the automobile, but the parking problem; not radio, but the soap opera; not the income tax, but the expense account; not the Bomb, but the nuclear stalemate." (Isaac Asimov, "From earth to heaven", 1972)
"It is a striking thought that ten years of radio astronomy have taught humanity more about the creation and organization of the universe than thousands of years of religion and philosophy." (Paul Davies, "Space and Time in the Modern Universe", 1977)
"The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground." (Carl Sagan, "Cosmos" 1980)
"Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it." (Terry Wogan, Observer, 1984)
"While amplitude damped spark gap radio waves are suitable for transmitting keyed on-off coded signals, such waves are not suitable for voice (or music) transmission. The reason for this can be understood once it is realized that for information to be transmitted it is necessary for something to change. If nothing changes, then the receiver of the signals can predict with perfect accuracy what the future nature of the signals will be - exactly what they werel It is unnecessary, actually, to transmit anything if nothing changes." (Paul J Nahin, "The Science of Radio", 1995)
"The mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: the human body- its organs, its voice, its powers of locomotion, and its imagination- is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time or energy level in the universe." (Terence McKenna,"True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival", 1998)
"New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?" (William L Heat-Moon,"Blue Highways: A Journey into America", 2012)
