Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. (p. 21)

The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

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)

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.

In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.

Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it.

Thus, as passivity becomes extreme in the bulk of society, a sizeable segment of citizens detaches itself from the dream-locked majority. As vulgarity and stupidity thicken, more and more people awaken to the intolerability of their condition. Much can be done to foster this state of awareness, even though little can be done directly to change the policies of those in control today of the media of communication.

The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”

That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which “made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.

Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)