Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)
-
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.
-
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)
-
Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
-
Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
-
The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)
-
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.
-
All words, in every language, are metaphors.
-
Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
-
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
-
Human perception is literally incarnation.
-
The uniformity and repeatability of print created the 'political arithmetic' of the seventeenth century and the 'hedonistic calculus' of the eighteenth. (p. 237)
-
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)
-
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
-
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
-
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
-
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
-
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.
-
Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)
-
Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
-
The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
-
Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)
-
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
-
Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.