Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.
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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.
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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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Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)
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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
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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)
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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
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The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
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When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
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It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.
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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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Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.
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Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
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I don't explain-I explore.