Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)
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The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
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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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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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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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My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. (p. 350)
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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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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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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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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The comic strip: upholder of Homeric culture. (p.19)
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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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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A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)
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Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.
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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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Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.