Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 7

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.

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

Electronic man has no physical body.

Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.

Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.

Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening. ... The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Human perception is literally incarnation.

People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.