Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 12

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

All media work us over completely.

Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

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.)

For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.

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.

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.

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.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

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

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.