Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
-
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
-
Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.
-
The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
-
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
-
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.
-
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)
-
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)
-
Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
-
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
-
We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.
-
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
-
The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)
-
War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
-
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
-
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
-
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
-
Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
-
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.
-
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
-
At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
-
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
-
Human perception is literally incarnation.
-
African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)