Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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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 increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the 'unified field' of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)
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The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)
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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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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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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
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It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)
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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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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 most human thing about us is our technology.
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
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By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)
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The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.
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Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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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)