Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)
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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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Casting my perils before swains.
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The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)
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Money is just the poor man's credit card.
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The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. (p. 168)
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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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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)
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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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The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)
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Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)
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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
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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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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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Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.
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New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.
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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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Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)
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The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
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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?
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Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.