Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The most human thing about us is our technology.
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A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. (p. 245)
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I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
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Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)
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Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
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All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
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The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
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In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
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Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
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There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)
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Every technology contrived and 'outered' by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization. (p. 174)
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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.
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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
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The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.
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By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)
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The Greeks encountered the confusion of tongues when numbers invaded Euclidean space. (p. 203)
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Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)
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Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. (p. 41)
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The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.
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Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)
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All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.
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All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)
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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. (p. 113)
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It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)