Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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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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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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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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In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)
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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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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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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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Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p. 114)
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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 space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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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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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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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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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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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 book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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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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Art is anything you can get away with.