Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)
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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
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We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation. (xx)
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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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Human perception is literally incarnation.
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Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.
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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.
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Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
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The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.
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The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)
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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose 'touch' without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.
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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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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.
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In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground. (p. 314)
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With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)
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New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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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)