Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
-
We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.
-
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.
-
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
-
Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)
-
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
-
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
-
Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
-
All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. (p. 227)
-
Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? (p. 121-125)
-
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)
-
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)
-
Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)
-
History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)
-
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
-
The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)
-
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)
-
People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)
-
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
-
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 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.
-
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
-
I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)
-
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.