Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. (p. 362)
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We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries. (p. 384)
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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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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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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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The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.
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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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Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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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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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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Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
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The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
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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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Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)