“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.”

“Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.”

“The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes”

“Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes.”

“The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends.”

“The essence of the problem is that once we begin to allow exceptions for special interests, we move from a system of private arrangements to a political system where everyone’s freedom is limited and government becomes a matter of trying to balance those interests. Nobody really wins under these terms.”

“Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.”

“The pleasure that painting as a dumb art give us, is like what we have from misic, its beautiful forms, vlour and harmony are to the eye what sounds and the harmony are to the ear.”

“The eye—it cannot choose but see;
we cannot bid the ear be still;
our bodies feel, where'er they be,
against or with our will.”

“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.”