Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)
-
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.
-
Human perception is literally incarnation.
-
The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.
-
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
-
Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
-
The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
-
The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
-
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)
-
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
-
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
-
When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
-
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
-
I don't explain-I explore.
-
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.
-
The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
-
Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
-
Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
-
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)
-
With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
-
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
-
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)
-
Money is a poor man's credit card.
-
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.