Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)
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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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The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
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The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)
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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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American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
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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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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.
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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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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
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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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Jokes are grievances.
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The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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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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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.