Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)
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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
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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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The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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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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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)
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Casting my perils before swains.
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
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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 book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. (p. 211)
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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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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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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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Jokes are grievances.
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.