Quote collection
376 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual."
"The media have substituted themselves for the older world."
"[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name."
"Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on."
"There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation."
"It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head."
"I'm not sure who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish."
"In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud."
"The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film."
"A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them."
"On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else."
"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."
"Life. Consider the alternative."
"Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression."
"You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?"
"Nobody can commit photography alone."
"... Their power to see environments as they really are."
"If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire."
"Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch."