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Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Total quotes: 14
“Guilt and remorse are retrospective by definition and exempt the guilty party from any redeeming act of expiation or creative renewal.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication
Tagged: Guilt, Remorse, In Retrospect
“Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Tagged: Typography, Technology, technology and communication, Print, Grammar, What is Good?
“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Tagged: Global Village, Technology, Simulacrum
“We have been through enough revolutions to know that every medium of communication is a unique art form which gives salience to one set of human possibilities at the expense of another set. ”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Interior Landscape
Tagged: New Media, New vs. Old Media, Changes In Media, Media
“The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Tagged: Typography, Knowledge, assembly-line, mass-production, Design Quotes
“Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Tagged: Typography, Technology, technology and communication, Design Quotes
“Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication
Tagged: Moralism, Time To Pretend
“Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Tagged: Technology, technology and communication, Grammar, What is Good?, Literacy
“Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension[…] The extension of a technology like the automobile ‘amputates’ the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition
Tagged: Culture, Technology
“Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Tagged: Medium, Translation, Transportation
“The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Tagged: Fragmentation, Tribalism, Writing, Alphabet
“I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me… My writings constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers… As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory — my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.”
— Marshall McLuhan, ucdavis.edu
Tagged: Pattern Recognition, Work Strategies
“I don't like to tell people what I think is good or bad about the social and psychic changes caused by new media, but if you insist on pinning me down about my own subjective reactions as I observe the reprimitivization of our culture, I would have to say that I view such upheavals with total personal dislike and dissatisfaction. I do see the prospect of a rich and creative retribalized society — free of the fragmentation and alienation of the mechanical age — emerging from this traumatic period of culture clash; but I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don't enjoy the destruction of neighborhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest.”
— Marshall McLuhan, ucdavis.edu
Tagged: Tradition
“The term 'communication' has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became transformed into 'information movement' in the electric age. Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity.”
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Tagged: Bridges, Communications, Electricity, History Of Communication, Roads
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