Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 6

The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures. (Marshall McLuhan)
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The mother tongue is propaganda. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place." View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world. (Marshall McLuhan)
Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Affluence creates poverty. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. (Marshall McLuhan)
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.' View quote
Marshall McLuhan