Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 14

Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.

When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.

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

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.

I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.

Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.

The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.

The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

Life. Consider the alternative.

Nobody can commit photography alone.