Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
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 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.
-
It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)
-
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of 'nature.' Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.
-
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
-
The 'natural magic' of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)
-
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
-
While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
-
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
-
The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
-
Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
-
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)
-
Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically. (p. 166)
-
Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. You can actually dissipate a situation by giving it maximal coverage. As to alarming people, that's done by rumours, not by coverage. (p. 92)
-
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
-
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
-
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. (p.66)
-
Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)
-
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
-
Language is a form of organized stutter.
-
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. (p. 8)
-
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
-
The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
-
Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)