Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 8

Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (Marshall McLuhan)
When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105) View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (Marshall McLuhan)
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made "bad grammar” possible. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
First we build the tools, then they build us. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (Marshall McLuhan)
Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body. View quote
Marshall McLuhan