Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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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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Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
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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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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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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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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 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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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
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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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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 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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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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Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.
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The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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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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The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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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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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.