Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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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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Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)
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Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times. (p. 253)
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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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The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. (p. 14)
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Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
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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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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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Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
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Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
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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 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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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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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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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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You don't like those ideas? I got others!
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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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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Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
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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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Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. (p. 13)