A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Living Unity (63 quotes)
There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged
under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
Marshall McLuhan
His letter of March 14, 1951 to Harold Innis, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 223
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Living Unity
Man traverses [Nature] through forests of resemblances
That observe him with familiar glances.
Charles Baudelaire
“Correspondences” (1857)
Chapter:
Living Unity
“I recall his saying that the invention of eyeglasses in the 12th and 13th centuries led us eventually to the idea of genetic manipulation.”
Philip Marchand
Marshall McLuhan The Medium and the Messenger: a Biography (1989), p vii
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Living Unity
The newspaper that could advertise every sort of product on one page quickly gave rise to department stores that provided every kind of product under one roof.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 200
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Advertising
The techniques of discontinuous juxtaposition in landscape poetry and painting were transferred to the popular press and the popular novel.
“Media Log”, In Explorations 4, (1955), p 53
Year: 1955
Chapters:
Discontinuity | Interval
One equivalent of psychoanalysis might be x-ray.
“Educational Effects of the Mass Media of Communication”, in Teachers College Record 1956, Vol. 57, No. 6, p 400
Year: 1956
Chapter:
Pattern Recognition
The starting point of this book [From Cliché to Archetype], then, is the “green-as-grass,” “quick-as-a-fox,” “brown-as-a-berry,” “as-right-as-rain” cliché. The resemblances between this sort of cliché and the auto engine as cliché are spectacular.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 55
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Cliché and Archetype
But biology is no longer the dominant science. The multi-leveled consciousness fostered by modern physics and anthropology is matched in the contemporary arts of music, poetry, and painting.
Auden: An Introductory Essay (Book Review), Renascence, 1952, p 220
Year: 1952
Chapters:
Consciousness | Science
In 1900 Max Planck produced this new quantum physics in which he pulled out all the connections, said there’s no connection in matter. The same year Picasso pulled out all the connections in space between art forms. The same year Freud, that’s 1900, pulled out the connection between the conscious and the unconscious and began his dream analysis. In that year all the connections were pulled out between all the things that had been joined before. And at the same time when Picasso pulled out the connections in space – cubism means all spaces simultaneously – when he pulled out those connections he plunged back into the utmost form of primitive consciousness. That is where modern man started, in 1900. Back into the most primitive kind of awareness. And this is where it’s at.
“The Medium Brings His Message to the Governor,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1978, p F1
Year: 1978
Chapter:
Cubism
The so-called-vulgar arts and recreations are not a popular substitute for the high arts. And the high arts of painting, music, and poetry are not an alternative to baseball, comics, and detective fiction. They are all closely interwoven in the single network of communication which makes any society what ever a living unity. In fact, that is the clue which I shall offer as the solution to the conundrum of "why is baseball culture?"
Baseball Is Culture, 1952 p 2
Year: 1952
Chapter:
Sports and Games
Drawn to McLuhan #4
The study of communication theory and practice… seems inevitably to hold the key to the unification of the proliferating specialisms of modern knowledge. In this study, the physicists can profitably confer with the student of poetry or philosophy. And the advertising executive can converse intelligibly with the anthropologist or linguist. In moving towards the harmonizing of the arts and sciences, the later Innis appears as one of the indisputable pioneers whose work will for long remain not only a standard reference but a source of ever renewed insight.
“The Later Innis" Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 60, No 3, Autumn (1953), p 393-394, reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 47
Year: 1953
Chapters:
Communication | Harmony
The plane ends the relation of wheel and road.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 22
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Evolution
If thirty years ago Mr. T. S. Eliot could modestly suggest that the internal combustion engine had modified the general ear for speech and rhythm, it is now obvious that the entire learning process has been changed by allied development.
“The Later Innis" Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 60, No 3, Autumn (1953), p 388, reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 42
Year: 1953
Father Hopkins, the English poet, may have been trying to substitute syllabic for prosodic stress in English poetry, just as Frank Lloyd Wright seems to have substituted American space for European space in architecture.
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 20, reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 125-126
Year: 1973
Today the great principle of classical physics and economics and political science, namely that of the divisibility of each process, has reversed itself by sheer extension into the unified field theory; and automation in industry replaces the divisibility of process with the organic interlacing of all functions in the complex. The electric tape succeeds the assembly line.
“Reversal of the Overheated Medium,” in The Essential McLuhan (1995), p 169
Year: 1995
As an example, the popular detective story depends on a technique of analysis and reconstruction which depends on the discontinuity of newspaper reportage. This discontinuity in turn is related to the technique of cinematic montage and also to the most successful contemporary methods of scientific analysis and to advanced technique in historiography, archaeology, and anthropology.
“Advertising as a Magical Institution” from The Commerce Journal, Toronto, (1952), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 21
Year: 1952
Chapters:
Effect | From Tribal to Literate | Hardware / Software | Symbolists | Time | Today’s Transition
Yet Gerard Manley Hopkins was crusading for tactile stress in word use and for vigorous oral poetry exactly at the time that Cezanne was giving tactile values to the retinal impression.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 83
Year: 1962
The sewing machine created the straight line in clothes, as much as the linotype flattened the human vocal style.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 120
Year: 1964
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Ecumenism? Why it's really another name for Marconi.
United Church Observer, Nov. 15, 1966
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Religion
It was in the format of the daily press that Rimbaud and Mallarmé discovered the means of rendering the interplay of all the functions of what Coleridge called the "esemplastic" imagination. * For the popular press offers no single vision, no point of view, but a mosaic of the postures of the collective consciousness, as Mallarmé proclaimed.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of typographic man (1965), p 267-268. * McLuhan is referring to his article “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954) p 38-55. Reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 5-21
Year: 1965
Today, with all our technology, and because of it, we stand once more in the magical acoustical sphere of pre-literate man. Politics have become musical; music has become politics. Government has become entertainment, and vice versa. Commerce has become incantation and magical gesture. Science and magic have married each other. Technology and the arts meet and mingle.
“Space, Time and Poetry” in Explorations 4, (1955) p 59, (2016) reprint, p 54, reprinted as McLuhan Unbound #13, (2017), p 9
Year: 1955
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Poets and painters invaded this inner landscape world [“le paysage intérieur”] long before Freud and Jung brought their cameras and notebooks to capture states of mind. Perhaps most spectacular of all was Claude Bernard, whose Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine ushered science into le milieu intérieur of the body exactly at the time when the poets did the same for the life of perception and feeling.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 201
Year: 1964
Written backward, in order that the effect of the story may always be the exact reconstruction of a crime, the [detective story] form is based on the same method as that employed in laboratory experiments in in modern historiography, archaeology, and mechanical production. But the detective story preceded these sciences in the discovery of this method. It is only one striking instance of popular expression which has its taproot in the deepest intuitions of our culture.
“Technology and Political Change,” in International Journal, Vol 7, No. 3, Summer, (1952), p 192
Year: 1952
Chapter:
Effect
No matter how the specialist of language or science strives to isolate his studies, he will find them resonating with the patterns and intensities of fields remote from his own. And is not the ground and existence of the common and shared measures of the language itself a main reason for this shared consciousness.
Roles, Masks, and Performance”, 1971
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Symbolists
However, the practitioners of Zen Buddhism have long had a doctrine of this sort concerning the momentary and unexpected transport from the realm of time to eternity, which has played an important role in the poetry of Mr. Eliot.
“The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry” (1952), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 162
Year: 1952
All actual and potential scientific theories are implicit in the verbal structure of the culture associated with them. By 1885 Mallarmé had formulated and utilized in his poetry these concepts about the nature of language uniting science and philology, which nowadays are known as "metalinguistics."
“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol. 28, No 1, (1953), in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 25
Year: 1953
That situation...always adds up to the need to discover means for translating the experience of one medium or one culture into another, of translating Confucius into Western terms and Kant into Eastern terms. Of seeing our old literary culture in the new plastic terms in order to enable it to become a constitutive part of the new culture created by the orchestral voices and gestures of new media. Of seeing that modern physics and painting and poetry speak a common language and of acquiring that language at once in order that our world may possess consciously the coherence that it really has in latency, and which for lack of our recognition has created not new orchestral harmonies but mere noise.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 126 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 311, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 136, and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Harmony
The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge the signature of existence, as a pure ensemble existence. But he can only put these in order by discovering the orchestral analogies in things themselves. The result will be “the hymn, harmony and joy ordered in the sharpest and most vivid circumstances of their interrelations. Man charged with divine vision has no other mode of expression save the parallelism of pages as a means of expressing the links, the whims, the limpidity on which he gazes.” [Quote by Stephane Mallarmé]
"Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 49, reprinted in The Interior Landscape The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 15
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Harmony
In modern physics there is, similarly the concept of “interface” or the meeting and metamorphosis of two structures. Such “interficiality” is the very key to the Renaissance as to our twentieth century.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 149
Year: 1962
The speed of information movement is very high and it creates a field rather than a simple area of subjects, it does not create subjects, it creates total field. This is in one way ecumenism, as opposed to the old sectarian, fragmented setup. And the same result is being felt in the area of subjects in the schools. They feel more and more need to interrelate and dialogue among disciplines.
“The New Education”, in The Basilian Teacher, Vol 7, No. 2, February, (1967), p 67
Year: 1967
It further implies that every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. The pointillage of Seurat is a derivative of Humean association psychology and exfoliates again in modern wire-photos. Movie technique has obvious relations with the panoramic devices of Scott or Tolstoy.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood,” in Sewanee Review, October 1947, p 714
Year: 1947
Chapters:
Extension Theory | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
[The Arts] presented a medium for unifying many fields.
Words he spoke in 1949; from the minutes of the Fifth “Values Symposium "meeting convened by W.T. Easterbrook, University of Toronto, 1949, recorded by Mary Quayle Innis in her minutes of the Fifth and Eighth meetings, U of Toronto Archives, quoted by Thomas W. Cooper in his dissertation, Pioneers in Communication: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, University of Toronto, 1979, p 176
Year: 1949
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 87
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Anticipating Change
I’m interested in such analogies with modern poetry as that provided by the vacuum tube. The latter can tap a huge reservoir of electrical energy, picking it up as a very weak impulse. Then it can shape it and amplify it to major intensity. Technique of allusion as you use it (situational analogies) seems comparable to this type of circuit. Allusion not as ornament but as precise means of making available total energy of any previous situation or culture. Shaping and amplifying it for current use.
Letter to Ezra Pound June 12 (1951), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 224
Year: 1951
Here is a major instance of how a by-product of industrial imagination, a genuine agency of contemporary folklore, led to radical artistic developments. To the alerted eye, the front page of a newspaper is a superficial chaos which can lead the mind to attend to cosmic harmonies of a very high order. Yet when these harmonies are more sharply stylized by a Picasso or a Joyce, they seem to give offense to the very people who should appreciate them most.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 4
Year: 1951
…there can be symbolic unity among the most diverse and externally unconnected facts or situations.
The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 80
Year: 1951
Electronics have not only abolished the old boundaries between nations and the planet, but between the arts and the sciences. And if post-literate men find the psychic price for these adventures is too high, they will devise new kinds of social equilibrium such as enabled pre-literate men to fix their social forms in patterns that sometimes held for hundreds of thousands of years
"Media Alchemy in Art and Society" (1958), p 67
Year: 1958
Chapter:
Electric, Electronic
The gradual admission of this organic criterion of 'total relevance' has come about in all fields of discussion in this century. It is equally the basis of anthropological study of cultures and of critical method in literature. The so-called 'new criticism' is, in the main, a recognition of the validity of the' total relevance' attitude to all forms of speech and composition. But it was for many centuries the basis of the doctrine of 'decorum' in behaviour and educated expression alike.
“Knowledge, Ideas, Information and Communication (A Canadian View)”, in The Yearbook of Education 1958, p 226
Year: 1958
Chapter:
New Criticism
In The Problem of Form, 1893 Adolf Hildebrand] insisted that true vision must be imbued with tangibility, and that creative, aesthetic awareness was touching and making. Such was the timeliness of his insistence, that the theme of artistic vision as tangible, tactile, and based on the interplace of the senses began to enjoy acceptance in poetry and painting alike.
“Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” in The Canadian Architect, Vol 6, No. 6, June, 1961, p 49
Year: 1961
Chapter:
Tactile, Touch
One ideal bloke for a jacket phrase [blurb for The Gutenberg Galaxy] would be C.P. Snow. Would you guess he could be induced? Me, admirer of The Masters etc. and the 2 cultures of course! My book aims to make them one.
Letter to Walter Ong, S.J., January 24, 1962, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 282
Year: 1962
Just what “science” or “philosophy” was at this time will be manifested by what each does to the other in their encounter in the social and historical process. And so with the other components. They explain themselves by their behavior in a historic action.
Introduction to H.A. Innis’s The Bias of Communication (1964), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 74
Year: 1964
The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology... We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude - a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being. Such is the faith in which this book has been written.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 5-6
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Today’s Transition
The principle of new technologies as an archetypal environment that moulds new art forms out of the antecedent technologies is a principle that applies to all the arts and sciences, to architecture, as much as to music, or mathematics.
“The New Media and the Arts” (1964), p 242
Year: 1964
…jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with many allied forms in painting and in music.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 280
Year: 1964
In education the conventional division of the curriculum into subjects is already as outdated as the medieval trivium and quadrivium after the Renaissance. Any subject taken in depth at once relates to other subjects. Arithmetic in grade three or nine, when taught in terms of number theory, symbolic logic, and cultural history, ceases to be mere practice in problems. Continued in their present patterns of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 347
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Electric, Electronic
Any subject taken to depth at once relates to other subjects.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 347
Year: 1964
One might wish to discover at this point whether it was the new stress on the study of geography in the early nineteenth century that provided the paradigm and impulse for literary surveys. Was not Kant a founding father of modern geography?
“Roles, Masks and Performances” (1970) in New Literary History, Vol 11, No. 3, Spring, 1971, p 530
Year: 1970
No matter how the specialist of language or science strives to isolate his studies, he will find them resonating with the patterns and intensities of fields remote from his own. And is not the ground and existence of the common and shared measure of the language itself a main reason for this shared consciousness?
“Roles, Masks, Performances”, 1971, in New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 3, Spring,1971, p 530
Year: 1971
Chapter:
Symbolists
On every page of the newspaper, in the discontinuous mosaic of unrelated human items, there is a resonance that speaks universality even in trIviality. Robert Louis Stevenson said, “I could make an epic from a newspaper if I knew what to leave out.”
“At the Moment of Sputnik—” (1974), typescript, p 4
Year: 1974
Chapter:
News
In 1900 Max Planck produced this new quantum physics in which he pulled out all the connections, said there’s no connection in matter. The same year Picasso pulled out all the connections in space between art forms. The same year Freud, that’s 1900, pulled out the connection between the conscious and the unconscious and began his dream analysis. In that year all the connections were pulled out between all the things that had been joined before. And at the same time when Picasso pulled out the connections in space – cubism means all spaces simultaneously – when he pulled out those connections he plunged back into the utmost form of primitive consciousness That is where modern man started, in 1900. Back into the most primitive kind of awareness. And this is where it’s at.
“The Medium Brings His Message to the Governor,” in Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1978, p F1
Year: 1978
Chapter:
Cubism
In The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra remarks the similarities between the forms of awareness implicit in modern physics and the traditional philosophy of Eastern, non- alphabetic cultures. The east bypasses hardware and absolute concepts in favor of percepts, that is, a 'direct, non-intellectual experience of reality'. A number of fundamental characteristics are independent of the mystic's geographical, historical, or cultural ground: 'The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view - one could almost say the essence of it - is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole, as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality' (The Tao of Physics, 174). The East, which never had a phonetic alphabet, never had a Euclid and never developed absolute concepts of space and time. However, now that China is pressing a program of (our) alphabetic literacy without attention to its side-effects, it may be expected soon to develop abstract concepts and a taste for hardware.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 43
Year: 1988
[News events today serve as a] literal realization of the physics formula that a particle moved at the speed of light acquires infinite mass. Today the most trivial facts can envelop and involve the whole world.
“The Hardware-Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?” Speech at the conference, Reappraisal of the Educational Technology Industry, University of Chicago, November 16-18, 1969. Transcript, p 10
Year: 1969
Chapters:
McLuhanisms & Zingers | News
Next a Baedeker for the university frustrates. A list of books with specific indications of their kind of relevance. A Guide to Kulch for the kind of people who remain illiterate through the misfortunes of current educational misguidance. (I should much like to see EP's Guide to Kulch in a Penguin. I should like to see it on every Walgreen counter. It is, in fact, very hard to get at all.)
Letter to Dorothy Shakespear Pound (1948), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 205
Year: 1948
Chapter:
Uncompleted and “Dream” Projects
“In 1973 he devoted himself primarily to two such projects. One was a book that he referred to as a ‘twentieth-century Baedeker,’ a kind of tour guide to the major scientific and artistic achievements of the century. In a ‘structural analysis’ of these achievements, the structure of artistic breakthroughs would be closely related to the structure of the scientific breakthroughs…”
Philip Marchand
MM: the Medium and the Messenger (1989), p 239
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Uncompleted and “Dream” Projects
“McLuhan signed a contract for his ‘Baedeker’ in 1971 with Doubleday, for what he called a ‘handsome advance.’ He intended to do a series of thousand-word essays on the various achievements he inventoried. These quickly transformed, in his mind, into one-hundred-word ‘groupings,’ highly aphoristic, that emphasized two basic themes.” [Accentuating the interweave of fresh modes of perception emerging from artists and scientists]
Philip Marchand
MM: the Medium and the Messenger (1989), p 239
Year: 1989
Since McLuhan's [new project] would also be a guidebook, "an inventory of breakthroughs in all the arts and sciences," he referred to it as "a Baedeker," after the well-known series of European guides. Later he would refer to it as "the twentieth-century Baedeker." Much later. For he had no idea how accurately he spoke in saying to Dorothy Pound, "a Baedeker for the university frustrates." Intended for "the kind of people who remain illiterate through the misfortunes of current educational misguidance," McLuhan's Baedeker never left his thoughts through the years that he gave to exploring media effects as the causes of that illiteracy.
W. Terrence Gordon
MM: Escape Into Understanding (1997), p 145
Year: 1997
Chapter:
Uncompleted and “Dream” Projects
[Circa 1948] “McLuhan rescued himself from disgust and despair over the Vanguard impasse [their delays in publishing The Mechanical Bride] with plans for his biggest project ever: nothing less than orchestrating a merging of the arts. This was the teaching program counterpart to his projected twentieth-century Baedeker. It meant he would have to ‘learn the grammar and general language of twenty major fields.’ Sigfried Giedion, author of Mechanization Takes Command, was an inspiration.”
W. Terrence Gordon
MM: Escape Into Understanding (1997), p 152
Year: 1997
Chapter:
Uncompleted and “Dream” Projects
[Describing his unfinished project, the “20th Century Baedeker"] ...a guide to unrecognized harmonies among the arts and sciences...
Letter to Dorothy Shakespear Pound [wife of Ezra Pound] Late September 1948, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 205
Year: 1948
Chapter:
Harmony
My object is to learn the grammar and general language of 20 major fields in order to help on an orchestra among the arts. cf. S.Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command [1948] as sample of how I should like to set up a school of literary studies.
Letter to Ezra Pound, January 5, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 215
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Uncompleted and “Dream” Projects
Chronology is not enough. Structural study [of patterns running through multiple areas] is needed. For example, in the year 1900 Max Planck’s quantum mechanics appealed to the same structural paradigm as Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in the same year. Both Planck and Freud proclaimed the same doctrine of discontinuity, the one in the physical world and the other in the psychological world. Overlapping Planck and Freud had been the development of “multi-locational” painting and sculpture, later to be called “cubism.” The advantage of structural analysis (developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics and Sigfried Giedion in art, and by Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology) is that the structural approach makes it possible to “read” whole cultures as “texts”. It is to the reading of the texts of arts and sciences since 1900 that our Centre project is directed. [Included in a letter requesting a grant to pursue his study of fresh modes of perception in science first discerned by poets and artists, a project he called the “20th Century Baedeker”]
Letter to Dr. T.C. Clark, administrator at the University of Toronto, July 26, 1974
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Cubism
It was Kant who first drew attention to Newtonian physics as an artistic fiction for the manipulation and control of nature. Since his time it has become normal to reverse this process and to see works of art in the same mode as scientific concepts and discoveries.
Review of Paul Klee (1953), p 79
Year: 1953
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
Electronics have not only abolished the old boundaries between nations and planets but between the arts and the sciences. And if post-literate men find the psychic price for these adventures is too high, they will devise new kinds of social equilibrium such as enabled pre-literate men to fix their social forms in patterns that sometimes held for hundreds of thousands of years.
“Media Alchemy in Art and Society” (1958), p 677
Year: 1958
Chapter:
Electric, Electronic
I would also point out that just as the booze panic of the 20s came with the jazz age and the initial retribalizing of the West, so the drug panic of the 60’s came with the inner trip that is the act of the TV viewer. In effect, the TV viewer is “stoned.” He doesn’t need chemical drugs in addition.
“Further Thoughts on Icons” (1970), p 38
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Drugs
AT ELECTRIC-INFORMATION SPEEDS ART AND SCIENCE AND NATURE CONVERGE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING MEDIA.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p148; capital letters in the original.
Year: 1972
Philip Marchand:
For his book [The 20th Century Baedeker] He intended to do a series of thousand-word essays on the various achievements he inventoried. These quickly transformed, in his mind, into one-hundred-word ‘groupings,’ highly aphoristic, that emphasized two basic themes: the first reflected his long-held belief that there was no real split between artistic and scientific enterprises, particularly in the twentieth century. The second heme underlined his belief that artists, far from merely being influenced by scientific discoveries, tended actually to anticipate those discoveries by several decades, in the patterns and approaches of their own work.
Marshall McLuhan: the Medium and the Messenger (1989), p 240
Year: 1989
…the same shift in time-sense that produced Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and Bohr’s theory of the atom.
An unnamed tetrad page of the original draft of Laws of Media, 1975, p 273
Year: 1975