Marshall McLuhan Quotes

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)

Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)

Beware clarity. A man speaking to you in clear language is clearly using obsolete ideas.

My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.

"In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning - he called it "a poison, and an enemy of the people.

The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)

The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold. Radio and TV can handle the sports, news, comics, and pictures. The editorial, which is the one book-feature of the newspaper, has been ignored for many years, unless put in the form of news or paid advertisement.

The difference between the man of print and the man of scribal culture is nearly as great as that between the non-literate and the literate.

things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.

The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)

The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.

Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia. (p. 130)

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare. (p. 230)