Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.

Marshall McLuhan
Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.

Marshall McLuhan
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

Marshall McLuhan
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Marshall McLuhan
The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.

Marshall McLuhan
Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.

Marshall McLuhan
The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page.

Marshall McLuhan
The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

Marshall McLuhan
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

Marshall McLuhan
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

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

Marshall McLuhan
Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.

Marshall McLuhan
Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

Marshall McLuhan
With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance.

Marshall McLuhan
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

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

Marshall McLuhan
Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

Marshall McLuhan
Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening...The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Marshall McLuhan
Violence is the effort to maintain and restore a weakened psyche.

Marshall McLuhan
Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.

Marshall McLuhan
Current concern with reading and spelling reform steers away from visual to auditory stress.

Marshall McLuhan
Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.

Marshall McLuhan
Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.

Marshall McLuhan
People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

Marshall McLuhan
Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.

Marshall McLuhan
The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration...

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

Marshall McLuhan
In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

Marshall McLuhan