Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 9

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.

The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.

The medium is the message.

For the satiated, both sex and speed are pretty boring until the element of danger and even death is introduced.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

Today, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.

The real news is bad news.

The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.

The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting.

I'm not sure who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish.