Marshall McLuhan Quotes
-
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.
-
Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)
-
The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
-
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)
-
In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
-
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
-
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
-
When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (p. 47)
-
Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
-
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
-
PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. 'LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,' she said. 'Likewise McLuhan.' Do you see any similarities?
-
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)
-
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.
-
The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
-
I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
-
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
-
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
-
The typographic logic created 'the outsider,' the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)
-
Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
-
The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'
-
The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
-
The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
-
The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.
-
People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)