Top 100 Mcluhan's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#4. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.
Marshall McLuhan
#5. 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
#6. The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.
Marshall McLuhan
#7. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.
Marshall McLuhan
#13. At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
Marshall McLuhan
#14. "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
#15. There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends,
Marshall McLuhan
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
Marshall McLuhan
#19. Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
Marshall McLuhan
#20. Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]
Marshall McLuhan
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.
Marshall McLuhan
#24. Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.
Marshall McLuhan
#25. Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
Marshall McLuhan
#26. The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
Marshall McLuhan
#27. On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.
Marshall McLuhan
#28. American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan
#29. Today, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.
Marshall McLuhan
#31. Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools!
Marshall McLuhan
#32. If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
Marshall McLuhan
#33. Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
Marshall McLuhan
#35. John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.
Anthony Burgess
#36. 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
#37. Homer's Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.
Marshall McLuhan
#38. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
Marshall McLuhan
#39. It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment . This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.
Marshall McLuhan
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up
thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.
Marshall McLuhan
#43. 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
#44. Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.
Marshall McLuhan
#45. The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.
Marshall McLuhan
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties ...
Marshall McLuhan
#52. 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
#54. Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening
Marshall McLuhan
#55. Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.
Marshall McLuhan
#56. Technology is that which separates us from our environment.
Marshall McLuhan
#57. Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
Marshall McLuhan
#58. 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
#60. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
Marshall McLuhan
#62. Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.
Marshall McLuhan
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
Marshall McLuhan
#67. Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
Marshall McLuhan
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.
Marshall McLuhan
#71. Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.
Marshall McLuhan
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.
Marshall McLuhan
#78. Attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content." And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people
Marshall McLuhan
#79. 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
#80. The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.
Marshall McLuhan
#81. Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
Marshall McLuhan
#82. 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
#84. Marshall McLuhan predicted books would become art objects at some point. He was right.
Woody Allen
#85. 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
#86. It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.
Marshall McLuhan
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds
Marshall McLuhan
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
Marshall McLuhan
#98. The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
Marshall McLuhan
#99. [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
#100. The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.
Marshall McLuhan
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