Top 100 Marshall McLuhan Quotes
#1. 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
#4. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
Marshall McLuhan
#5. Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
Marshall McLuhan
#6. The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.
Marshall McLuhan
#7. [On Jimmy Carter] Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place.
Marshall McLuhan
#8. The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
Marshall McLuhan
#9. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
Marshall McLuhan
#10. One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North
personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare. (A Carnegie or a Ford, like a bureaucracy, molds the lives of millions without taking any responsibility.)
Marshall McLuhan
#11. 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
#12. Attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content." And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people
Marshall McLuhan
#13. 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
#14. Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
Marshall McLuhan
#15. What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.
Marshall McLuhan
#18. 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
#20. Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.
Marshall McLuhan
#21. What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.
Marshall McLuhan
#22. The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.
Marshall McLuhan
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
Marshall McLuhan
#27. There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.
Marshall McLuhan
#28. We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.
Marshall McLuhan
#29. The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.
Marshall McLuhan
#32. 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
#33. Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.
Marshall McLuhan
#34. The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
Marshall McLuhan
#35. The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.
Marshall McLuhan
#37. Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.
Marshall McLuhan
#38. Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.
Marshall McLuhan
#39. The wheel ... is an extension of the foot.
The book ... is an extension of the eye ...
Clothing, an extension of the skin ...
Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.
Marshall McLuhan
#40. All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.
Marshall McLuhan
#41. A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
Marshall McLuhan
#42. 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
#43. World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
Marshall McLuhan
#44. Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.
Marshall McLuhan
#45. As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
Marshall McLuhan
#46. North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social.
Marshall McLuhan
#47. The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
Marshall McLuhan
#48. Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
Marshall McLuhan
#49. To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.
Marshall McLuhan
#50. Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr
Marshall McLuhan
#51. New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
Marshall McLuhan
#52. The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.
Marshall McLuhan
#53. Playboy: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?
McLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.
Marshall McLuhan
#54. Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.
Marshall McLuhan
#56. 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
#57. The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
Marshall McLuhan
#58. The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.
Marshall McLuhan
#59. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
Marshall McLuhan
#60. If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
Marshall McLuhan
#61. Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
Marshall McLuhan
#62. The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
Marshall McLuhan
#63. When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.
Marshall McLuhan
#64. Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.
Marshall McLuhan
#66. While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
Marshall McLuhan
#67. The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.
Marshall McLuhan
#69. The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.
Marshall McLuhan
#70. In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.
Marshall McLuhan
#71. Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.
Marshall McLuhan
#72. They will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Marshall McLuhan
#73. It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.
Marshall McLuhan
#74. All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
Marshall McLuhan
#75. The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
Marshall McLuhan
#76. When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.
Marshall McLuhan
#77. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
Marshall McLuhan
#78. 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
#79. There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.
Marshall McLuhan
#82. In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.
Marshall McLuhan
#83. We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.
Marshall McLuhan
#84. Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.
Marshall McLuhan
#85. The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.
Marshall McLuhan
#86. Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
Marshall McLuhan
#88. 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.
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Marshall McLuhan
#89. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
Marshall McLuhan
#90. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
Marshall McLuhan
#91. 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
#92. When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.
Marshall McLuhan
#94. 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
#95. The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting.
Marshall McLuhan
#96. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.
Marshall McLuhan
#97. The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
Marshall McLuhan
#98. That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.
Marshall McLuhan
#100. The logos of creation, 'And God Said ... ' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.
Marshall McLuhan
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