Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Marshall Mcluhan, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Marshall Mcluhan quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 362 Marshall Mcluhan quotes for you to read and share.
Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
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
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
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
If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists? -- Marshall Mcluhan
if it works it's obsolete -- Marshall Mcluhan
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Only the vanquished remember history. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Electronic man has no physical body. -- Marshall Mcluhan
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
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 meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form. -- 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
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
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
Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
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
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
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
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 content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The 'content' of any medium is always another medium. -- 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
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
In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology ... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love. -- Marshall Mcluhan
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. -- 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
Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse. -- 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
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati. -- 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 medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action. -- Marshall Mcluhan
As a rule, I always look for what others ignore. -- Marshall Mcluhan
All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
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
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
The present is only faced in any generation by the artist. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it. -- Marshall Mcluhan
I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Some days, I wish the whole fucking world would just 'phone in sick. -- 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
Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it. -- Marshall Mcluhan
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws. -- 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
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
It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The percept takes priority of the concept. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration. -- Marshall Mcluhan
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire. -- 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
We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers. -- Marshall Mcluhan
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody. -- 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
Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The literate man is a sucker for propaganda ... You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Advertisements constitute the only 'good news' in the newspaper. -- 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
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
Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Technology is that which separates us from our environment. -- 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
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment. -- Marshall Mcluhan
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age. -- 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
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness. -- Marshall Mcluhan
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. -- Marshall Mcluhan
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result. -- Marshall Mcluhan
In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on. -- Marshall Mcluhan
[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
Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Pornography and obscenity ... work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground
situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks. -- 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
Diaper backwards spells repaid. Think about it. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Money is a poor man's credit card. -- 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
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
The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, "Why do you kids use 'cool' to mean 'hot'?" The friend replied, "Because you folks used up the word 'hot' before we came along. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath. -- Marshall Mcluhan
As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Their power to see environments as they really are. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users. -- 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
Any breakdown is a breakthrough. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. -- Marshall Mcluhan
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. -- Marshall Mcluhan
A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. -- 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 winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content." And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people -- Marshall Mcluhan
Money is just the poor man's credit card. -- Marshall Mcluhan
We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions. -- 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 subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the
psyche and society into a single echo chamber. -- Marshall Mcluhan
As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime, -- Marshall Mcluhan
Human perception is literally incarnation. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt. -- 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 content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. -- 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 car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very week identity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval. -- 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
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
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
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
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time. -- Marshall Mcluhan
It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space. -- 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
The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis. -- 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 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
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror.
Speech is a social chart of this bog. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Art is anything you can get away with. -- Marshall Mcluhan
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. -- Marshall Mcluhan
What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Even mud gives the illusion of depth. -- Marshall Mcluhan
When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. -- 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
The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness. -- Marshall Mcluhan
There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends, -- Marshall Mcluhan
Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32] -- Marshall Mcluhan
A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's problems. -- 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
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
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
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man. -- 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
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
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
Anything that's popular is a rear-view image. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Jokes are grievances. -- Marshall Mcluhan
It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Fish did not discover water. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar -- 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
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The logos of creation, 'And God Said ... ' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature. -- Marshall Mcluhan
North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social. -- 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 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
Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men. -- 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
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror. -- Marshall Mcluhan
We go forward looking in the rearview mirror. -- Marshall Mcluhan
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Education is civil defence against media fallout. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam. -- Marshall Mcluhan
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding. -- 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
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
The most human thing about us is our technology. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure. -- 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
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Art is whatever you can get away with. -- 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
Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death? -- Marshall Mcluhan
There is no more great men; there is only great committees. -- Marshall Mcluhan
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot ... for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there. -- 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
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language. -- 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
All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions. -- Marshall Mcluhan
I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened. -- 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
The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation. -- 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
Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time. -- Marshall Mcluhan
All words, in every language, are metaphors. -- Marshall Mcluhan
We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration ... -- Marshall Mcluhan
Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher. -- 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
The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception. -- 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 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
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will. -- Marshall Mcluhan
We impose the form of the old on the content of the new. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change. -- 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
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
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Language is a form of organized stutter. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The user of the electric light
or a hammer, or a language, or a book
is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. -- Marshall Mcluhan
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both. -- Marshall Mcluhan
To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name. -- Marshall Mcluhan
One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor. -- Marshall Mcluhan
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
The medium is the message. -- Marshall Mcluhan
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. -- Marshall Mcluhan
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message -- Marshall Mcluhan
When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. -- Marshall Mcluhan
There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society. -- Marshall Mcluhan
All media work us over completely. -- Marshall Mcluhan
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. -- Marshall Mcluhan
First we build the tools, then they build us. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Our permanent address is tommorrow. -- Marshall Mcluhan
New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media. -- 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
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention. -- 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
People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Life. Consider the alternative. -- Marshall Mcluhan
They will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Nothing is inevitable if we are willing to contemplate what is happening. -- 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
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
First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us -- Marshall Mcluhan
The mother tongue is propaganda. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition. -- Marshall Mcluhan
It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Playboy: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?
McLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The future of work consists of learning a living. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The media have substituted themselves for the older world. -- Marshall Mcluhan
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role. -- Marshall Mcluhan
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home. -- Marshall Mcluhan
I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say. -- Marshall Mcluhan
I do not explain, I explore. -- Marshall Mcluhan
For the satiated, both sex and speed are pretty boring until the element of danger and even death is introduced. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Radio affects most intimately, person-to-perso n, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener -- Marshall Mcluhan
We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. -- Marshall Mcluhan
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The answers are always inside the problem, not outside. -- Marshall Mcluhan
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us. -- Marshall Mcluhan
What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The real news is bad news. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
Nobody can commit photography alone. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Our technology forces us to live mythically -- Marshall Mcluhan
The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The 'expert' is the man who stays put. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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
The price of eternal vigilance is indifference. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,
Stay as you are. -- Marshall Mcluhan
I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic. -- Marshall Mcluhan
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. -- Marshall Mcluhan
We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish. -- Marshall Mcluhan
When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself. -- Marshall Mcluhan
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist. -- Marshall Mcluhan
We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future. -- Marshall Mcluhan
I'm not sure who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish. -- Marshall Mcluhan
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 <>trong>trtrong> -- Marshall Mcluhan