Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 12

The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (Marshall McLuhan)
The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
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.”. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
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. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress. (Marshall McLuhan)
When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241) View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy. (Marshall McLuhan)
Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational. View quote
Marshall McLuhan