Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.
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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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Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.
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Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.
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Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.
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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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The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that. (p. 286)
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I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.
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Jokes are grievances.
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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.
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A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.
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The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show. (p. 56)
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At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
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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.
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The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. (p. 55)
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We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
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The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.
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Art is anything you can get away with.
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At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)
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In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner. (p. 4)
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Typography cracked the voices of silence. (p. 283)
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Headlines are icons, not literature. (p. 5)