Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.

Marshall McLuhan
The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

Marshall McLuhan
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

Marshall McLuhan
The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

Marshall McLuhan
At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.

Marshall McLuhan
By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

Marshall McLuhan
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

Marshall McLuhan
All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

Marshall McLuhan
Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

Marshall McLuhan
War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.

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
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Marshall McLuhan
By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.

Marshall McLuhan
Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

Marshall McLuhan
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

Marshall McLuhan
Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space... it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

Marshall McLuhan
The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

Marshall McLuhan
History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order.

Marshall McLuhan
Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.

Marshall McLuhan
The copy [of an ad] is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the [product] goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

Marshall McLuhan
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

Marshall McLuhan
Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

Marshall McLuhan
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.

Marshall McLuhan
Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.

Marshall McLuhan
The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.

Marshall McLuhan
Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

Marshall McLuhan
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.

Marshall McLuhan
The typographic logic created the outsider, the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.

Marshall McLuhan
The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.

Marshall McLuhan
Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

Marshall McLuhan