Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
-
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
-
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
-
Boyoboy oboyoboy oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy...
-
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.
-
We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
-
All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)
-
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
-
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
-
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
-
Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.
-
The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
-
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.
-
I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)
-
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
-
History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
-
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)
-
It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
-
Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
-
Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)
-
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
-
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
-
The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
-
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)