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Quotes from The Gutenberg Galaxy — Marshall McLuhan

1911–1980 Canada

← All quotes by Marshall McLuhan

74 quotes

The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to “the Africa within.” (p. 51)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The uniformity and repeatability of print created the “political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the “hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth. (p. 237)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare. (p. 230)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The Greek “point of view” in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages. (p. 64)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible. (p. 263)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Attribution

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