Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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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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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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The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)
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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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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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Jokes are grievances.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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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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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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King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)
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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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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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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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Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)
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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 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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The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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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 space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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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 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.