Marshall McLuhan on Mind

"The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas."

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order."

"Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark."

"Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception."

"Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors."

"Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere."

"The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space."

"The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem."

"Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner."

"Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind."

"Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness."

"The percept takes priority of the concept."

"You don't like those ideas? I got others!"

"Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness...This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man."