Mcluhan Quotes & Sayings

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren't going somewhere, you're already there. On the telephone you're not going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we're already there.
McLuhan CD-ROM — Marshall McLuhan

Even mud gives the illusion of depth. — Marshall McLuhan

Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it. — Marshall McLuhan

As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life. — Marshall McLuhan

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light. — Marshall McLuhan

Nobody can commit photography alone. — Marshall McLuhan

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity. — Marshall McLuhan

Any breakdown is a breakthrough. — Marshall McLuhan

The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch. — Marshall McLuhan

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. — Marshall McLuhan

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

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village. — 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

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands. — Marshall McLuhan

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch. — Marshall McLuhan

I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society. — 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

Our permanent address is tommorrow. — Marshall McLuhan

If you go with Marshall McLuhan's theory that the medium is the message, as soon as you're hosting a blooper show, you're done. — Bob Saget

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

I was on a panel with Marshall McLuhan in Canada. Someone says, 'Mr. McLuhan, I read your book, and I disagree with you.' And he says, 'Oh, you read my book? Then you only know half the story.' — James Rosenquist

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 logos of creation, 'And God Said ... ' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature. — Marshall McLuhan

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. — Marshall McLuhan

North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social. — Marshall McLuhan

Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on. — 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

For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell. — Neil Postman

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

I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think. — Marshall McLuhan

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. — Marshall McLuhan

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors ... Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects. — Marshall McLuhan

Education is civil defence against media fallout. — Marshall McLuhan

There's always been an incredible amount of junk music, and junk everything. Marshall McLuhan said that a medium surrounds a previous medium, and turns the previous medium into an art form. So, what was once a junk culture, like film, television surrounded it and turned it into an art form. — T Bone Burnett

All media work us over completely. — Marshall McLuhan

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

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space. — Marshall McLuhan

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system. — Marshall McLuhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. — Marshall McLuhan

The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity ... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability. — Marshall McLuhan

Arists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another. — Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was right when he said that television has made a global village of the world - but he didn't know the global village would be Beirut. — Joseph Campbell

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. — Marshall McLuhan

The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting. — Marshall McLuhan

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

For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. — Richard Barbrook

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication ... is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. — Marshall McLuhan

There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures. — Marshall McLuhan

I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say. — Marshall McLuhan

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity. — 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

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in. — Marshall McLuhan

When information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms. — Marshall McLuhan

Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody. — Marshall McLuhan

The most human thing about us is our technology. — 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

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors. — Marshall McLuhan

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. — Marshall McLuhan

In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground. — Marshall McLuhan

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

We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. — Marshall McLuhan

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds — 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 alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus. — 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

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference. — Marshall McLuhan

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

If, as Marshall McLuhan once taught us, the medium is the message, then Derfner's medium-this lovely, discursive amalgamation of wit and smarts-is indeed his message about how to stay happy, sane, and honest in whatever situation one finds oneself in. — Philip Gambone

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore. — 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

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. — Marshall McLuhan

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers. — Marshall McLuhan

As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, we've become so removed from reality that we're starting to prefer artificiality. — Adam Leith Gollner

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us — 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

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. — Marshall McLuhan

Anything that's popular is a rear-view image. — Marshall McLuhan

I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago. — Chris Marker

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word. — Marshall McLuhan

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

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications. — B.W. Powe

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression. — 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

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual. — Marshall McLuhan

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities. — Marshall McLuhan

The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up. — Marshall McLuhan

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced. — Anthony Burgess

Jokes are grievances. — Marshall McLuhan

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. — Marshall McLuhan

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future. — Marshall McLuhan

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

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

To bring order into this jangled sphere man must find its centre Marshall McLuhan — Douglas Coupland

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. — Marshall McLuhan

It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it — Marshall McLuhan