Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)
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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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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.
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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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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
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Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. (p. 80)
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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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The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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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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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
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Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
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As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.
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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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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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The uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
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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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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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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)