Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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.
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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 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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Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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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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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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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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Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
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The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.
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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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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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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)
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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied. (p. 346)
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Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.
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The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.' (p. 204)
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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.