Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)
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Language is a form of organized stutter.
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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 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.
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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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We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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The new science of communication is percept, not concept. (p. 259)
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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 mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal. (p. 352)
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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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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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The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
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The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.
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Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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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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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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Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)
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The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
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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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For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
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The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
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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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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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Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.