A Quote by Marshall McLuhan

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Marshall McLuhan

Quote Topics

Engine Everybody Except First Immortality Mistaken Press Printing Printing Press Shakespeare

Quote Author

Marshall McLuhan
Canadian - Sociologist
July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980

If you think about it, the printing press allowed everyone to print books - it democratised the printing of information. For the first time, we could all print.

Neri Oxman

Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?

Jules Verne

First book was handwritten, then the printing press, now we've got our Kindles. To be able to push a button and a dictionary comes up. And then, at my age, that I can make the letters any size I want, and that I can carry all of William Shakespeare, all of Gogol, all of Franz Kafka in my handbag? You've got to love it.

Lore Segal

In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it's very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access, not just to knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in people's crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis.

Don Tapscott

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

Terence McKenna

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on.

James E. Burke

'Legends Walking' was the first of my books to go to a second printing based on strong initial orders, but much of that printing never found its audience.

Jane Lindskold

In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful." The press was busy printing money.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on.

William J. Mitchell

Ink is the blood of the printing-press.

John Milton

Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without the printing press? Would the American Revolution have happened without pamphlets? Probably not. But neither printing presses nor pamphlets were the heroes of reform and revolution.

Rebecca MacKinnon

The coming of the motion picture was as important as that of the printing press.

William Randolph Hearst

It is production that creates purchasing power, not the printing press!

Peter Schiff

I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly--except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses; never, I believe, by people.