Mcluhan Quotes

#1. Marshall McLuhan predicted books would become art objects at some point. He was right.

Woody Allen

#2. Whatever emotional state you're in while you're parenting conveys more to your child than the content of what you're doing with them, no matter how perfect your intervention looks "on paper." In other words, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, "your emotional state is the message.

Michael Y. Simon

#3. Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.

Margaret Atwood

#4. 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

#5. Playboy: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?
McLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.

Marshall McLuhan

#6. I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.

Chris Marker

#7. The medium is the message. -Marshall McLuhan
The message is the marketing. -Gideon Stevens

Gideon Stevens

#8. 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

#9. (When McLuhan announced that the medium was the message, he was being arch. The medium is both opposite to, and entwined with, the message.)

James Gleick

#10. 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

#11. John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.

Anthony Burgess

#12. 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

#13. As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.

John Cage

#14. 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

#15. Propaganda begins when dialogue ends. (Quoted by Marshall McLuhan in McLuhan Hot & Cool)

Jacques Ellul

#16. 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

#17. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, we've become so removed from reality that we're starting to prefer artificiality.

Adam Leith Gollner

#18. 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

#19. To bring order into this jangled sphere man must find its centre Marshall McLuhan

Douglas Coupland

#20. 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

#21. All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Marshall McLuhan

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

Marshall McLuhan

#25. Diaper backwards spells repaid. Think about it.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

#27. The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.

Marshall McLuhan

#28. Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Marshall McLuhan

#29. 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

#30. Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

Marshall McLuhan

#31. The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

Marshall McLuhan

#32. The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

Marshall McLuhan

#33. Only the vanquished remember history.

Marshall McLuhan

#34. Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

#36. There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

Marshall McLuhan

#37. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

Marshall McLuhan

#38. Their power to see environments as they really are.

Marshall McLuhan

#39. 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

#40. Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

Marshall McLuhan

#41. Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

Marshall McLuhan

#42. Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

Marshall McLuhan

#43. Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening

Marshall McLuhan

#44. I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.

Marshall McLuhan

#45. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

Marshall McLuhan

#46. The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.

Marshall McLuhan

#47. [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

#48. The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

Marshall McLuhan

#49. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

Marshall McLuhan

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds

Marshall McLuhan

#54. Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Marshall McLuhan

#55. 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

#56. Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also
patterns of communal interdependence.

Marshall McLuhan

#57. The 'content' of any medium is always another medium.

Marshall McLuhan

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

Marshall McLuhan

#61. 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

#62. Jokes are grievances.

Marshall McLuhan

#63. The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

Marshall McLuhan

#64. Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Marshall McLuhan

#65. The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

Marshall McLuhan

#66. I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Marshall McLuhan

#67. Attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content." And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people

Marshall McLuhan

#68. The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

Marshall McLuhan

#69. 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

#70. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

#72. Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.

Marshall McLuhan

#73. A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Marshall McLuhan

#74. 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

#75. Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.

Marshall McLuhan

#76. Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]

Marshall McLuhan

#77. Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Marshall McLuhan

#78. Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

Marshall McLuhan

#79. A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Marshall McLuhan

#80. There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends,

Marshall McLuhan

#81. "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

#82. At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

Marshall McLuhan

#83. What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

Marshall McLuhan

#84. The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

Marshall McLuhan

#85. Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery.
The politician will be only too happy to abdicate
in favor of his image, because the image will
be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Marshall McLuhan

#86. if it works it's obsolete

Marshall McLuhan

#87. Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Marshall McLuhan

#88. The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.

Marshall McLuhan

#89. The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.

Marshall McLuhan

#90. 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

#91. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.

Marshall McLuhan

#92. 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

#93. Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

Marshall McLuhan

#94. Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very week identity.

Marshall McLuhan

#95. The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.

Marshall McLuhan

#96. Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.

Marshall McLuhan

#97. Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

Marshall McLuhan

#98. 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

#99. What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

Marshall McLuhan

#100. The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

Marshall McLuhan