Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.
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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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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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Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)
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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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Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark. (p. 14)
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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.
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Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
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We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
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The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)
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The book is a private confessional form that provides a 'point of view.'
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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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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 global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
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The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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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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Affluence creates poverty.
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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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Jokes are grievances.
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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)
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Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
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The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)