Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 13

Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.

The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.

Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.