Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Affluence creates poverty.
-
One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
-
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
-
Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
-
Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
-
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
-
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.
-
War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
-
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)
-
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
-
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)
-
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
-
The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.
-
My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
-
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)
-
Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
-
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)
-
All words, in every language, are metaphors.
-
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
-
Human perception is literally incarnation.
-
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)
-
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.