Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 10

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

There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

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.

The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

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

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

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

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

The medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.

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

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.

A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.

The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.