Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
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There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
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Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.
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The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
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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.'
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King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
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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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Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
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Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)
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I don't explain-I explore.
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Human perception is literally incarnation.
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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)
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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)