Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

Marshall McLuhan
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Marshall McLuhan
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

Marshall McLuhan
For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Marshall McLuhan
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Marshall McLuhan
All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

Marshall McLuhan
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.

Marshall McLuhan
Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.

Marshall McLuhan
Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.

Marshall McLuhan
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

Marshall McLuhan
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

Marshall McLuhan
Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why.

Marshall McLuhan
Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

Marshall McLuhan
Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
The hallucinogenic world, in environmental terms, can be considered as a forlorn effort of man to match the speed of power of hisextended nervous system (which we call the "electronic world") by intensifying the activity of his inner nervous system.

Marshall McLuhan
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

Marshall McLuhan
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

Marshall McLuhan
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

Marshall McLuhan
Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

Marshall McLuhan
King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs.

Marshall McLuhan