Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)
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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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There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.
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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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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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Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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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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The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.
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All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology. (p. 84)
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Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
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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 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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By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
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Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. (p. 194)
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The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.
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Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
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Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)
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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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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)