Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.
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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.
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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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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Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
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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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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
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The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press. (p. 106)
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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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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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.
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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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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.