Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p. 47)
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There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)
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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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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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Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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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)
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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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Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
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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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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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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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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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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. (p. 113)
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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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It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)
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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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The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)
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The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
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Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.
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The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)
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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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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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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)