Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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 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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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
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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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Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
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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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Art is anything you can get away with.
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The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)
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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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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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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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The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'
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The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
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On Jimmy Carter 'Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.'
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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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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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One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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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)
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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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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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All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.
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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.