Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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)
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War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)
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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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Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
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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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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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The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
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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.
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In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)
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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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Affluence creates poverty.
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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
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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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The Greek 'point of view' in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (p. 64)
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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)
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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)
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)