Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.

Marshall McLuhan
By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us.

Marshall McLuhan
Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.

Marshall McLuhan
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.

Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a man-made environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."

Marshall McLuhan
Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times.

Marshall McLuhan
The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.

Marshall McLuhan
The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies.

Marshall McLuhan
The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

Marshall McLuhan
Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

Marshall McLuhan
Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

Marshall McLuhan
Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

Marshall McLuhan
We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

Marshall McLuhan
Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

Marshall McLuhan
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Marshall McLuhan
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

Marshall McLuhan
Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

Marshall McLuhan
The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations.

Marshall McLuhan
Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

Marshall McLuhan
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

Marshall McLuhan
The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.

Marshall McLuhan
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Marshall McLuhan
The Greek point of view in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages.

Marshall McLuhan
We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

Marshall McLuhan
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

Marshall McLuhan
The computer is by all odds the most extraordinary of all the technological clothing ever devised by man, since it is the extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

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
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.

Marshall McLuhan
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.

Marshall McLuhan
The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

Marshall McLuhan