Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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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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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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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. (p. 30)
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The medium is the message.
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The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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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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My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
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The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
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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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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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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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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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When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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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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TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.
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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)