Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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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 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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Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)
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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures. (p. 25)
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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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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)
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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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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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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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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 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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Jokes are grievances.
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)
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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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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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We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.