Skip to content

Quotes from The Gutenberg Galaxy — Marshall McLuhan

1911–1980 Canada

← All quotes by Marshall McLuhan

74 quotes

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Does the interiorization of media such as letters alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes? (p. 28)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. (p. 26)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized. (p. 47)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation. (p. 288)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marshall McLuhan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.