Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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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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Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)
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Invention is the mother of all necessities.
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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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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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The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)
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Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.
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With Francis Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.
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Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. (p. 133)
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)
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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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TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...TV tends to fosters patterns rather than events.
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To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
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World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts. (p. 152)
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Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
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Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. (p. 13)