Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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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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Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)
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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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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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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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As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.
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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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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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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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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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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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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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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 medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)
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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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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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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)