Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 3

In Tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground. (Marshall McLuhan)
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot... for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos – resonant utterance or word. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks. (Marshall McLuhan)
The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201) View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The literate man is a sucker for propaganda... You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Only puny secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by public incredulity. (Marshall McLuhan)
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. View quote
Marshall McLuhan