Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
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Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)
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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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I don't explain-I explore.
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Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made 'bad grammar' possible. (p. 263)
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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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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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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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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Environment is process, not container. (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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Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
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Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)
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Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)
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The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
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The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)
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War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
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PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. 'LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,' she said. 'Likewise McLuhan.' Do you see any similarities?
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The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the 'unified field' of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)
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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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The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)