Marshall McLuhan Quotes & Sayings

People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath. — Marshall McLuhan

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. — Marshall McLuhan

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. — Marshall McLuhan

Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation. — Marshall McLuhan

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message — Marshall McLuhan

Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought. — Marshall McLuhan

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar — Marshall McLuhan

The hallucinogenic world, in environmental terms, can be considered as a forlorn effort of man to match the speed of power of hisextended nervous system (which we call the "electronic world") by intensifying the activity of his inner nervous system. — Marshall McLuhan

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it. — Marshall McLuhan

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools! — Marshall McLuhan

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation. — Marshall McLuhan

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community. — Marshall McLuhan

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant. — Marshall McLuhan

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling. — Marshall McLuhan

There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society. — Marshall McLuhan

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality. — Marshall McLuhan

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds. — Marshall McLuhan

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. — Marshall McLuhan

Money is just the poor man's credit card. — Marshall McLuhan

In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought. — Marshall McLuhan

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with. — Marshall McLuhan

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter. — Marshall McLuhan

Technology is that which separates us from our environment. — Marshall McLuhan

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources. — Marshall McLuhan

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation. — Marshall McLuhan

The logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph. — Marshall McLuhan

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration ... — Marshall McLuhan

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put. — Marshall McLuhan

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning. — Marshall McLuhan

if it works it's obsolete — Marshall McLuhan

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation. — Marshall McLuhan

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art. — Marshall McLuhan

The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially. — Marshall McLuhan

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us. — Marshall McLuhan

Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about. — Marshall McLuhan

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist. — Marshall McLuhan

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age. — Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. — Marshall McLuhan

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion. — Marshall McLuhan

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community. — Marshall McLuhan

Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules. — Marshall McLuhan

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses. — Marshall McLuhan

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head. — Marshall McLuhan

The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing. — Marshall McLuhan

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness. — Marshall McLuhan

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch. — Marshall McLuhan

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception. — Marshall McLuhan

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression. — Marshall McLuhan

Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men. — Marshall McLuhan

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions. — Marshall McLuhan

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy. — Marshall McLuhan

Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression. — Marshall McLuhan

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer. — Marshall McLuhan

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. — Marshall McLuhan

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language. — Marshall McLuhan

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened. — Marshall McLuhan

Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience. — Marshall McLuhan

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground. — Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. — Marshall McLuhan

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish. — Marshall McLuhan

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man. — Marshall McLuhan

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. — Marshall McLuhan

For the satiated, both sex and speed are pretty boring until the element of danger and even death is introduced. — Marshall McLuhan

Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists. — Marshall McLuhan

The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature. — Marshall McLuhan

The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions — Marshall McLuhan

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine. — Marshall McLuhan

The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes. — Marshall McLuhan

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events. — Marshall McLuhan

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech. — Marshall McLuhan

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse. — Marshall McLuhan

Nothing is inevitable if we are willing to contemplate what is happening. — Marshall McLuhan

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. — Marshall McLuhan

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces. — Marshall McLuhan

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. — Marshall McLuhan

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves. — Marshall McLuhan

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny - if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image - tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes. — Marshall McLuhan

Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening — Marshall McLuhan

The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function.
McLuhan CD-ROM — Marshall McLuhan

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product. — Marshall McLuhan

They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; — Marshall McLuhan

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. — Marshall McLuhan

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us — Marshall McLuhan

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. — Marshall McLuhan

The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities.
McLuhan CD-ROM — Marshall McLuhan

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside. — Marshall McLuhan

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty. — Marshall McLuhan

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time. — Marshall McLuhan

When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems. — Marshall McLuhan

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. — Marshall McLuhan

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. — Marshall McLuhan

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession. — Marshall McLuhan

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.' — Marshall McLuhan

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton. — Marshall McLuhan

Art is anything you can get away with. — Marshall McLuhan

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness. — Marshall McLuhan

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies. — Marshall McLuhan

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both. — Marshall McLuhan

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration. — Marshall McLuhan

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media
movies, Telstar, flight
far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage. — Marshall McLuhan