Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 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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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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Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)
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Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity. (p. 18)
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Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete. (p. 99)
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Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African. (p. 38)
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Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. (p. 33)
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The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.
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Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.
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For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)
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The mother tongue is propaganda.
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When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.
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The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance. (p. 263)
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A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism. (p. 144)
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Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
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Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords. (p. 302).
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I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.
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Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. (p. 132)
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Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice. (p. 24)
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The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.
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Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)
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The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
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Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.