-
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
Marshall McLuhan -
Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
Marshall McLuhan
-
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Marshall McLuhan -
Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
Marshall McLuhan -
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)
Marshall McLuhan -
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.
Marshall McLuhan -
I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
Marshall McLuhan -
The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
Marshall McLuhan
-
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
Marshall McLuhan -
Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)
Marshall McLuhan -
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Marshall McLuhan -
Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)
Marshall McLuhan -
The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
Marshall McLuhan -
If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
Marshall McLuhan
-
Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
Marshall McLuhan -
The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)
Marshall McLuhan -
The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
Marshall McLuhan -
One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.
Marshall McLuhan -
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.
Marshall McLuhan -
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.
Marshall McLuhan
-
Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
Marshall McLuhan -
The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
Marshall McLuhan -
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. (p. 36)
Marshall McLuhan -
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)
Marshall McLuhan