Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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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 method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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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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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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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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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 name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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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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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (p. 47)
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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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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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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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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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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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The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.