Printing Press Quotes

“What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.”
― Wendell Phillips

“Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.”
― Karl Marx, Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003. Die Deutsche Ideologie: Artikel, Druckvorlagen, Entwürfe, Reinschriftenfragmente und Notizen zu "I. Feuerbach" und "II. Sankt Bruno"

“A printing press took the thoughts from someone’s mind and inked them on to a piece of paper anyone might read. It was a kind of magic. A magic to alter the world.”
― Gita Trelease, Enchantée

“With the development of the printing press, not only could text be mass-produced quickly, it could also be mass-produced quickly and incorrectly.”
― The Bureau Chiefs, Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide

“The internet is the most important tool for disseminating information we've had since the invention of the printing press. Unfortunately, it's also one of the best ways of stealing or suppressing information and for putting out misinformation.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In French printer's jargon, cliche (which mimicked the sound of a mold striking molten metal) was a synonym for stereotype, which in turn evolved from the Greek for "solid impression." A stereotype was a printing plate that duplicated typography and that was used by the printer in lieu of the original.
So a cliche is a word or phrase used over and over again in lieu of the original.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

“This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.”
― Sara Sheridan

“An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. The sixteenth century Renaissance was an age on the frontier between two thousand years of alphabetic and manuscript culture, on the one hand, and the new mechanism of repeatability and quantification, on the other.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“..the kind of influence printing has had on modern sensibility… : the shattering of the intellectual experience into uniform and repeatable units, the establishment of a sense of homogeneity and continuity that generated, at a distance of centuries, the assembly line, and presided over the ideology of the mechanical age, as well as the cosmology of infinitesimal calculation.”
― Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality

“The printing press has published more ghosts and spirits than god has.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“The difference between the man of print and the man of scribal culture is nearly as great as that between the non-literate and the literate.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“… religious sentiment was opposed to [print], as it was considered that it was sacrilegious to print their holy book, the Koran. The printed sheets might be put to improper use or stomped upon or thrown in the rubbish heap.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru (Author), Discovery of India