Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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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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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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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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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 inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
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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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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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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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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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Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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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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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
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On Jimmy Carter 'Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.'
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.