Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.

Marshall McLuhan
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

Marshall McLuhan
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Marshall McLuhan
By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.

Marshall McLuhan
All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.

Marshall McLuhan
Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.

Marshall McLuhan
It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.

Marshall McLuhan
Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

Marshall McLuhan
Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the content, which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.

Marshall McLuhan
If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly aquire new meanings and different textures... and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and closure of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.

Marshall McLuhan
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

Marshall McLuhan
In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man's physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.

Marshall McLuhan
When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.

Marshall McLuhan
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

Marshall McLuhan
New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.

Marshall McLuhan
It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

Marshall McLuhan
Tactility is the space of the interval; acoustic space is spherical and resonant.

Marshall McLuhan
While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

Marshall McLuhan
The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.

Marshall McLuhan
Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

Marshall McLuhan
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

Marshall McLuhan
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

Marshall McLuhan
All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone.

Marshall McLuhan
The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers.

Marshall McLuhan
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.

Marshall McLuhan
At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

Marshall McLuhan
The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.

Marshall McLuhan
The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.

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