Understanding Media (1964)
Context: Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. (p. 261)
“The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.”
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
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Marshall McLuhan 416
Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor … 1911–1980Related quotes
Vol. I, Part III: The Evolution of Life, Ch. 3 : General Aspects of the Evolution Hypothesis; compare: "As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth, / So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud (1855)
Principles of Biology (1864)
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
Source: The Haunting of Hill House
“Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.”
Earliest source located that attributes this to Einstein is the 1975 book The Nature of Scientific Discovery: A Symposium Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus edited by Owen Gingerich, p. 585 http://books.google.com/books?id=Ub3gAAAAMAAJ&q=%22certainly+a+central%22#search_anchor. But long before that, the 1944 book Einstein: An Intimate Study of a Great Man by Dimitri Marianoff and Palma Wayne contains the following quote on p. 62: "But Einstein came along and took space and time out of the realm of stationary things and put them in the realm of relativity—giving the onlooker dominion over time and space, because time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live." It appears from the quote that the authors were giving their own description of Einstein's ideas, not quoting him.
Misattributed
“Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.”
1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)
“There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.”
Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 75
How the Economy Affects Our Mental Health, September 18, 2018 https://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/when-profit-drives-us-community-suffers-20180918