Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
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The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
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Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
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The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)
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Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
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All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.
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The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.
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The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
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Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)
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I don't explain-I explore.
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There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
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Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)
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One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)