By accessing or using this site you accept and agree to our Terms and Conditions
We run an ad-free website, help us keep going, Support Us!
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Marshall McLuhan
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The medium is the message.”
“Art is anything you can get away with.”
“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.”
“With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. ”
“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”
“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”
“The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.”
“The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.”
“Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.”
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves as promotional material only. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
action, marshall-mcluhan, humor, media, machine, vigilance, attention, rationality, consciousness, comedy, system, philosophy, indifference, slap-stick, art