Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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Casting my perils before swains.
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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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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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There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
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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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Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
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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 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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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
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In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)
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The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.
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Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.
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Tactility is space of the interval.
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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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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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Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind. (p. 256)