Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Marshall McLuhan - Page 4

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

I am a Christian according to my conscience in belief,in purpose and wish;Mnot of course by the orthodox standard. But I am content, and have a feeling of trust and safety. The Machiavellian mind and the merchant mind are at one in their simple faith in the power of segmental division to rule all--in the dichotomy of power and morals and of money and morals.

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.

To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.

Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.

The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.

Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.

Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules.

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.

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.

Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.

The cave art of Madison Avenue has been by far the most innovative and educative art form of the twentieth century.

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.

The 'content' of any medium is always another medium.

TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing.

When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.

The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.

The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

For the satiated, both sex and speed are pretty boring until the element of danger and even death is introduced.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.

In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.

Nothing is inevitable if we are willing to contemplate what is happening.

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message

The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...

People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

Only the vanquished remember history.

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

Human perception is literally incarnation.

Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.

The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr

Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

When information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.