Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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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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While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)
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People never remember but the computer never forgets. (p. 69)
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The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
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As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'
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Tactility is space of the interval.
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Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)
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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.
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Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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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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The percept takes priority of the concept.
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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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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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There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious. (p. 260)
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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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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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Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
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The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)
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Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)
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Casting my perils before swains.