Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)

The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)

The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)

The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)

The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)

The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)

The Greek “point of view” in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (p. 64)

The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)