Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)
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Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity. (p. 18)
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Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.
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Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.
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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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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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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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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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The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.
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Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.
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For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)
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The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch. (p. 334)
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The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance. (p. 263)
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The mother tongue is propaganda.
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Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African. (p. 38)
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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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A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism. (p. 144)
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The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
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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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Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
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I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.
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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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Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. (p. 132)