Quotes from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“All media work us over completely.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story "The Emperor's New Clothes".”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Art is whatever you can get away with.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“The wheel… is an extension of the foot.
The book… is an extension of the eye…
Clothing, an extension of the skin…
Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime,”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“The ear favours no particular “point of view.”
We are enveloped by sound.

It forms a seamless web around us.

We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus.

Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.”

We can‘t shut out sound automatically.

We simply are not equipped with earlids.

Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror.
Speech is a social chart of this bog.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“The past went 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.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment—of what's really going on—affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Until writing was invented, man lived in an acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Homer’s Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools—with yesterday's concepts.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“The Newtonian God—the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

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Popular quotes

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“If you dont like me, Walk away , Matter of fact Run Away”
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― Henry Miller, quote from Tropic of Capricorn

“Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths. You make out To Do lists - reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself - slices of ice-cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her hand-writing was the best thing about her. But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing, to the ground. About all of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“There have,” said I, “been numerous petty thefts.”
Holmes snorted his contempt.
“This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than that,” said he. “It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, quote from His Last Bow

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