348 quotes
The photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put in the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)
Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.
Culture Is Our Business (1970)
By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.
Counterblast (1969)
When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.
The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)
By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.
The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
Through the Vanishing Point (1968)
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.
The Medium is the Massage (1967)
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation. (p. 362)
The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)
Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.
The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.
Culture Is Our Business (1970)
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication. (p. 23)
The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)
Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.
The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)
Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.