The Mechanical Bride Quotes

“Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man

“The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man

“The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man

“Thus, as passivity becomes extreme in the bulk of society, a sizeable segment of citizens detaches itself from the dream-locked majority. As vulgarity and stupidity thicken, more and more people awaken to the intolerability of their condition. Much can be done to foster this state of awareness, even though little can be done directly to change the policies of those in control today of the media of communication.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man

“Either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man

“The formula for this brand of "historical" writing is to put the public on the inside; to let them feel the palpitations of royal and imperial lovers and to overhear their lispings and cooings. It can be argued that a man has to live somewhere, and that if his own time is so cut up by rapid change that he can't find a cranny big enough to relax in, then he must betake himself to the past. That is certainly one motive in the production of historical romance, from Sir Walter Scott to Thornton Wilder. But mainly this formula works as a means of flattery. The public is not only invited inside but encouraged to believe that there is nothing inside that differs from its own thoughts and feelings. This reassurance is provided by endowing historical figures with the sloppiest possible minds. The great are "humanized" by being trivial.
The debunking school began by making the great appear as corrupt, or mean and egotistical. The "humanizers" have merely carried on to make them idiotic. "Democratic" vanity has reached such proportions that it cannot accept as human anything above the level of cretinous confusion of mind of the type popularized by Hemingway's heroes. Just as the new star must be made to appear successful by reason of some freak of fortune, so the great, past or present, must be made to seem so because of the most ordinary qualities, to which fortune adds an unearned trick or idea.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man