Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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.
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Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)
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Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
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Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)
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The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to 'the Africa within.' (p. 51)
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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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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.
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The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)
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Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.
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Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology. (p. 85)
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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.
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
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Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)
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We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)
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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.
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
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Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.