Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
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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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Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
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A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
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We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)
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Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)
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If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
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The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
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Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)
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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)
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Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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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 sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.