Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
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The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon. (p. 12)
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Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
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Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
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The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.
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When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments. (p. 180)
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I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
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Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
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Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. (p. 186)
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Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)
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Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
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All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)
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The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)
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When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.
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In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
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Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)
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The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
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I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)
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It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)
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The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
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I am not a 'culture critic' because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.
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The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.