Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
-
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)
-
Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)
-
The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
-
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
-
The 'interface' of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)
-
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
-
African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
-
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
-
Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
-
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
-
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
-
There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead
-
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.
-
I don't explain-I explore.
-
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.
-
Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
-
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)
-
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)
-
Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
-
Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.
-
With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
-
The uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
-
Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.