Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation. (p. 288)

The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)

Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)

Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. (p. 280)

Philosophy was as naive as science in its unconscious acceptance of the assumptions or dynamic of typography. (p. 278)

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)

Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)

Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such. (p. 267)

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

Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible. (p. 263)

Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixations of languages. (p. 260)

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)

Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)

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