348 quotes
Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
The Mechanical Bride (1951)
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.
New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?
Understanding Media (1964)
People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
Newton, and 'proper scientific method' after him, conducted attention to 'continuous description' of experimental phenomena instead of to causes.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
The most human thing about us is our technology.
In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.
A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995)
The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.
A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995)