Quotes from the record

This is the Quotes From The Record category.

Quotes from the LP recording of “The Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McLuhan, released by Columbia Records in March 1967, conceived and co-ordinated by Jerome Agel, and produced by John Simon. Listen to Side A and Side B via ubu.com.

“The
Medium
Is the
Massage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 42

“Soon, all that will be required of us will be one hour’s work per year.”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“Writing destroyed word linkages.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“John, John who?”

“He also doesn’t make very many value judgements or suggestions about what people should do about these things.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“Take it easy, but take it.”

— John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

“…what has been worked over to give it a general character very very few people can experience directly.”

— Jacques Ellul, “The Political Illusion”

“The art of the speaker consists in compressing all of his aims into slogans.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us…”

— John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review)

“WHAT’LL HAPPEN WHEN INTELLIGENCE IS RECOGNIZED AS A GLOBAL RESOURCE?”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

Side 2

The wheel …is an extension of the foot.

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 46

{The book} is an extension of the eye…

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 368

Clothing, [is] an extension of the skin…

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 129

Electric circuitry, [the medium of our time, is] an extension of the central nervous system.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 3

“[Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions.] The extension of any one sense [displaces the other senses and] alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. [The way we perceive our own bodies.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 69

“When
these
ratios
change,
men change.

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 9 and “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 98

“Right.”

“They [I Ching] told me to continue what I was doing, and to spread JOY and revolution.”

— John Cage, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors”

“If I don’t smoke, someone else will…”

— Erik Satie quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

{The method of our time is to use not single but multiple models for [experimental] exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment} [is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth.]

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 71

“And now a word from our sponsor…”

“Speak that I may see you.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Counterblast” (1954)

“…a mother, a father, two children and an anthropologist.”

— John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review)

“What’s the definition of an Eskimo family?”

“Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Silence is the unintended sounds of our environment.”

— John Cage, derived from Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors” and referred to in “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“[Robert Oppenheimer was fond of saying:] There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted by Marshall McLuhan in “Address at Vision 65”, p. 12

“Four P.M. throughout the world. Whether we like it or not…”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 31

“Lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”