Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)

With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)

The coverage is the war. If there were no coverage, there'd be no war. Yes, the newsmen and the mediamen around the world are actually the fighters, not the soldiers anymore.

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

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

Some days, I wish the whole fucking world would just 'phone in sick.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

The person who falls suddenly experiences immunity to all pain or sensory stimuli because the central nervous system has to be protected from any intense thrust of sensation. Only gradually does he regain normal sensitivity to sights and sounds, at which time he may begin to tremble and perspire and to react as he would have done if the central nervous system had been prepared in advance for the fall that occurred unexpectedly.

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)

The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education. (p. 381)

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. (p.73 of the 1966 Signet paperback edition)

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.