Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 13

All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation. (Marshall McLuhan)
The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (Marshall McLuhan)
The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Casting my perils before swains. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
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. (Marshall McLuhan)
Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom. View quote
Marshall McLuhan