Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
-
All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
-
The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)
-
On Jimmy Carter 'Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.'
-
One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
-
The percept takes priority of the concept.
-
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
-
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.
-
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
-
In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)
-
The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
-
All words, in every language, are metaphors.
-
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.
-
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
-
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
-
The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
-
The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. (p. 30)
-
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
-
Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
-
Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
-
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
-
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)
-
Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
-
Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.