Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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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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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
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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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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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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
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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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The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press. (p. 106)
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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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While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)
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Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind. (p. 256)
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)