Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Marshall McLuhan
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

Marshall McLuhan
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

Marshall McLuhan
The Greek point of view in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages.

Marshall McLuhan
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.

Marshall McLuhan
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Marshall McLuhan
The natural magic of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package.

Marshall McLuhan
King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

Marshall McLuhan
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

Marshall McLuhan
The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.

Marshall McLuhan
Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan
Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography.

Marshall McLuhan
The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement.

Marshall McLuhan
Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.

Marshall McLuhan
The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.

Marshall McLuhan
Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.

Marshall McLuhan
The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man.

Marshall McLuhan
A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.

Marshall McLuhan
The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within.

Marshall McLuhan
The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels.

Marshall McLuhan
The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.

Marshall McLuhan