Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.
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A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
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Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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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)
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Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.
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The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to 'the Africa within.' (p. 51)
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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 mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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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)
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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.
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Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant. (p. 106)
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The 'tragic flaw' is not a detail of characterization, a mere 'fly in the ointment', but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (p.45)
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.
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The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.