Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
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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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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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Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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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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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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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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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.
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We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.
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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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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
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Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
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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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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.