Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
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A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)
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In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)
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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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Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
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Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
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Every technology contrived and 'outered' by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)
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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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I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
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There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)
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Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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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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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
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The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)
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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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Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. (p. 33)
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All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
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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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It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)
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All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)