Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
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We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
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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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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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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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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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Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
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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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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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Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
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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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History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
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In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
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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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People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)
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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.
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The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)
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I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)
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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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We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
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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.