Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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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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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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The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
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The typographic logic created 'the outsider,' the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)
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There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.
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All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)
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Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
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The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)
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Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)
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Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
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The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images. (p. 360)
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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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People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.
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The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.
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The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)
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Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table. (p. 15)
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The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity. (p. 369)
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The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them. (p. 152)
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Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of 'what the public wants' played over its own nerves. (p. 68)
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Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
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All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
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All words, in every language, are metaphors.
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At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.
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There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.