Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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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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Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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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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Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
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The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. (p. 275)
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The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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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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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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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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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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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
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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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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. (p. 21)
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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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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 sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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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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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.
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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.