Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes (page 18)

“In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 8

Books , Study

“Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 166

“Cartoons drove the photo back to myth and dream screen.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

Dreams , Photo

“By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 15

Universe

“Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.”

Marshall McLuhan

Yeats studies, Issue 2, Irish University Press, 1972, p. 135
1970s

“The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 74

Parting

“World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 152

War , World

“Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 99

Books

“Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Violence in the media." Canadian Forum. Volume 56, 1976, p. 9
1970s

“One touch of nature makes the whole world tin.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

World , Nature

“The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 272

Life , Age

“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p.66

War , World

“With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 177

Life , Change

“While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 21

People , World

“We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

World

“In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 47

Age

“The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 203

“TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern…[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

“The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.””

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

Books

“At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 109

Speed