Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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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)
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The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
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African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)
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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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Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
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Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
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The uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
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Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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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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Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
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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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The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.
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Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)
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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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The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
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Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.