Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)

The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)

Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (p. 54)

The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to “the Africa within.” (p. 51)

A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)

When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (p. 47)

African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. (p. 44)

Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)

Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African. (p. 38)

What began as a "Romantic reaction" towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of electro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous "field" in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a "global village." We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums. So that concern with the "primitive" today is as banal as nineteenth-century concern with "progress," and as irrelevant to our problems. The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. (p. 36)

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. (p. 30)

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

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. (p. 26)

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 anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)