“To start announcing your own preferences for old values when your world is collapsing and everything is changing at a furious pitch: this is not the act of a serious person. It is frivolous, fatuous. If you were to knock on the door of one of these critics and say “Sir, there are flames leaping out of your roof, your house is burning,” under these conditions he would then say to you, “That’s a very interesting point of view. Personally, I couldn’t disagree with you more.”

That’s all these critics are saying. Their house is burning and they’re saying, “Don’t you have any sense of values, simply telling people about fire when you should be thinking about the serious content, the noble works of the mind?”

Marshall McLuhan (via Quote and Comment)