Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche. (p. 377)
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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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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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. (p. 23)
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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)
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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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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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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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Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.
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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)
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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.