Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)

Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)

The private sponge and the collective sponge, both reaching out for their rations of sensation, achieved a horrible distinctness and clarity that matched the raw power of the predatory army machine. With the cutting-off of the supplies of papyrus by the Mohammedans, the Mediterranean, long a Roman lake, became a Muslim lake, and the Roman center collapsed. What had been the margins of this center-margin structure became independent centers on a new feudal, structural base. The Roman center collapsed by the fifth century a.d. as wheel, road, and paper dwindled into a ghostly paradigm of former power.

Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)

Invention is the mother of all necessities.

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)

As forms, as media, the book and the newspaper would seem to be as incompatible as any two media could be. The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.

The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)

The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.

By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)

America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.