The Gutenberg Galaxy Quotes

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]”
― Marshall McLuhan, La galaxia Gutenberg: Génesis del homo typographicus

“they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing;”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

“they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

“An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. The sixteenth century Renaissance was an age on the frontier between two thousand years of alphabetic and manuscript culture, on the one hand, and the new mechanism of repeatability and quantification, on the other.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“homogeneity is quite incompatible with electronic culture”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which “made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

“Knowledge does not extend but restricts the areas of determinism.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“Even a restricted consciousness is far more interesting than the unconscious profound”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“the first age of print introduced the first age of the unconscious. Since print allowed only a narrow segment of sense to dominate the other senses, the refugees had to discover another home for themselves. We have seen how aware of this meaning of the effects of print were the Spaniards. Don Quixote is as much as Lear a demonstration of the dichotomies of mind and heart and sense instituted by the printed book.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“Pictorial advertisements and movies finally did for women what print technology had done for men centuries before. When raising these themes, one is beset by queries of the "Was it a good thing?" variety. Such questions seem to mean: "How should we feel about these matters?" They never suggest that anything could be done about them. Surely, understanding the formal dynamic or configuration of such events is the prime concern. That is really doing something. Control and action in terms of values must follow understanding. Value judgments have long been allowed to create a moral fog around technological change such as renders understanding impossible.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“the key to any kind of applied knowledge is the translation of a complex of relations into explicit visual terms. The alphabet itself as applied to the complex of the spoken word translates speech into a visual code that can be uniformly spread and transported. Print had given an intensity to this latent process that was a virtual educational and economic take-off.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“This principle of translating non-visual matters of motion and energy into visual terms is the very principle of "applied" knowledge in any time or place.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“Oddly enough, it is a consumer-oriented culture that is concerned about authors and labels of authenticity. Manuscript culture was producer-ori-ented, almost entirely a do-it-yourself culture, and naturally looked to the relevance and usability of items rather than their sources. Not only was private authorship in the later print meanings unknown, but there was no reading public in our sense, either. This is a matter that has usually been confused with ideas about "the extent of literacy." But even if literacy were universal, under manuscript conditions an author would still have no public. An advanced scientist today has no public. He has a few friends and colleagues with whom he talks about his work. What we need to have in mind is that the manuscript book was slow to read and slow to move or be circulated.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“But Rashdall is right in considering the oral man to be a barbarian. For technically the "civilized" man is, whether crude or stupid, a man of strong visual bias in his entire culture, a bias derived from only one source, the phonetic alphabet.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“The difference between the man of print and the man of scribal culture is nearly as great as that between the non-literate and the literate.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“It is necessary to understand that nonliterate peoples identify themselves very much more closely with the world in which they live than do the literate peoples of the world. The more "literate" people become, the more they tend to become detached from the world in which they live.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“culture that is engaged in translating itself from one radical mode such as the auditory, into another mode like the visual, is bound to be in a creative ferment, as was classical Greece or the Renaissance.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“The miseries of conflict between the Eastern and Roman churches, for example, are a merely obvious instance of the type of opposition between the oral and the visual cultures, having nothing to do with the Faith.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“The Greeks expressed these new modes of visual perception in the arts. The Romans extended lineality and homogeneity into the civic and military spheres, and into the world of the arch and of enclosed or visual space.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“the mental sound movie which we call reading.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“the menta sound movie which we call reading.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“all reading in the ancient and medieval worlds was reading aloud. With print the eye speeded up and the voice quieted down”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“the breaking apart of sight and sound and meaning which is the key to the phonetic alphabet”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“Meantime, it is relevant to note that Cicero, the encyclopedic synthesizer of the Roman world, when surveying the Greek world, reproves Socrates for having been the first to make a split between mind and heart. The pre-Socratics were still mainly in a non-literate culture. Socrates stood on the border between that oral world and the visual and literate culture.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“The Romans carried out the alphabetic translation of culture into visual terms. The Greeks, whether ancient or Byzantine, clung to much of the older oral culture with its distrust of action and applied knowledge.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“Far from being a normal mode of human vision, three-dimensional perspective is a conventionally acquired mode of seeing, as much acquired as is the means of recognizing the letters of the alphabet, or of following chronological narrative.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy