Marshall McLuhan

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception...When these ratios change, men change.

We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)

History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)

Art is anything you can get away with.

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures...and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.” (p. 264)

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice. (p. 24)

Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming. (p. 267)

The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment. (p. 30)

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)