Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.
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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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Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
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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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The medium is the message.
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Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
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Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
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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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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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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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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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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 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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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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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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Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)
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The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
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Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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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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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
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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.