Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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On Jimmy Carter 'Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.'
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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
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At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
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There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy - the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.
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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)
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Money is a poor man's credit card.
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Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)
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The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
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Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped. (p. 309)
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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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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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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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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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Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. (p. 80)
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Casting my perils before swains.
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Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made 'bad grammar' possible. (p. 263)
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The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the 'unified field' of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)
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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.