Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
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)
-
Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
-
The medium is the message.
-
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
-
Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)
-
Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
-
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)
-
When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals. (p. 261)
-
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)
-
The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. (p. 152)
-
The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word.
-
With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)
-
The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.
-
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.
-
The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)
-
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
-
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
-
The typographic logic created 'the outsider,' the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)
-
I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
-
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
-
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)