Marshall McLuhan on Human Nature

"Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human."

"Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."

"The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology."

"Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly."

"Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status."

"All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical."

"Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society."

"People never remember but the computer never forgets."

"In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin."

"Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension."

"A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space."

"The most human thing about us is our technology."

"Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks."

"We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared."

"The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods."