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. (p. 186)"

"Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote. (p. 242)"

"The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)"

"Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. (p. 183)"

"Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)"

"The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)"

"Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies. (p. 86)"

"For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)"

"Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)"

"Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)"

"The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)"

"Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human. (p. 220)"

"Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)"

"The uniformity and repeatability of print created the “political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the “hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth. (p. 237)"

"A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. (p. 73)"

"Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. (p. 84)"

"The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels. (p. 99)"

"Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)"

"The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production. (p. 142)"

"Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)"

"The celebrated earthy tactility of Rabelais is a massive backwash of receding manuscript culture. (p. 170)"

"With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)"

"The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)"

"Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters. (p. 200)"

"The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators. (p. 205)"

"Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)"

"Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism. (p. 226)"

"The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)"

"The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare. (p. 230)"

"The portability of the book, like that of the easel-painting, added much to the new culture of individualism. (p. 233)"

"The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology. (p. 61)"

"The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness. (p. 72)"

"Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation. (p. 77)"

"The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)"

"In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. (p. 94)"

"Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance. (p. 96)"

"The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)"

"The medieval student had to be paleographer, editor, and publisher of the authors he read. (p. 109)"

"The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)"

"Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class. (p. 136)"

"A fixed point of view becomes possible with print and ends the image as a plastic organism. (p. 144)"

"The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)"

"The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis. (p. 161)"

"Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. (p. 167)"

"Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)"

"Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)"

"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. (p. 64)"

"The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)"

"The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)"

"Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)"