Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Marshall McLuhan - Page 7

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

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.

All media work us over completely.

One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North--personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare. (A Carnegie or a Ford, like a bureaucracy, molds the lives of millions without taking any responsibility.)

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

The user of the electric light - or a hammer, or a language, or a book - is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.

Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he [Jimmy Carter] puts nostalgia in its place.

Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.

Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social.

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar

All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.