Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Jokes are grievances.
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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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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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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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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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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)
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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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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)
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Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)
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The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
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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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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
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The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)
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As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.
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I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
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As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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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)