Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 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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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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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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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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Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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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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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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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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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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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 '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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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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Jokes are grievances.
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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.
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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 tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. (p. 275)