Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 11

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• In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Plato, Writing, Media

  7 Copy quote

• The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Song, Jobs, Book

  6 Copy quote

• A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Tone, Social, Members

  7 Copy quote

• The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message

  Marshall McLuhan

  Light, Information, Messages

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  5 Copy quote

• Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Modern, Vulgar

  Marshall McLuhan (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy”, p.125, University of Toronto Press

  7 Copy quote

• A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Light, Environment, Bulbs

  9 Copy quote

• Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Attitude, Writing

  "Understanding media: the extensions of man".

  12 Copy quote

• Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Museums, Innovation

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Barrington Nevitt, Harold Adams Innis (2005). “Marshall McLuhan: The argument: causality in the electric world”

  5 Copy quote

• The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Experts, He Man

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

  5 Copy quote

• Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Taken, Media, Wire

  4 Copy quote

• Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Giving, Depth, Mud

  6 Copy quote

• The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Photography, Dream, Stars

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  7 Copy quote

• I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Culture, World, Way

  "Letters of Marshall McLuhan". Book edited by Corrine McLuhan, Matie Molinaro and William Toye, March 1, 1987.

  7 Copy quote

• Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Literacy, Fractions, Has Beens

  Marshall McLuhan (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy”, p.135, University of Toronto Press

  6 Copy quote

• The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Firsts, Immortality, Printing

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p.230, University of Toronto Press

  9 Copy quote

• To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Skins, Machines

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  5 Copy quote

• The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Order, Use, Language

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Barrington Nevitt, Harold Adams Innis (2005). “Marshall McLuhan: Roles, masks and performances”

  7 Copy quote

• The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Past, Mirrors, Views

  55 Copy quote

• Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Men, Mind, Frogs

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  16 Copy quote

• The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Science, Independence, World

  Marshall McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, William Toye (1987). “Letters of Marshall McLuhan”, Oxford University Press, USA

  52 Copy quote

• Nobody can commit photography alone.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Photography, Commit

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  4 Copy quote

• Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Moving, Feet, Ease

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  7 Copy quote

• Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Nature, Science, Law

  Marshall McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, William Toye (1987). “Letters of Marshall McLuhan”, Oxford University Press, USA

  5 Copy quote

• Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Gossip, Taverns, Bumps

  11 Copy quote

• When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Business, Curves, Want

  9 Copy quote

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