Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

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
Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

Marshall McLuhan
The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

Marshall McLuhan
All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

Marshall McLuhan
Today, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.

Marshall McLuhan
When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.

Marshall McLuhan
When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.

Marshall McLuhan
I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties...

Marshall McLuhan
The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

Marshall McLuhan
Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.

Marshall McLuhan
The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

Marshall McLuhan
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Marshall McLuhan
As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

Marshall McLuhan
We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

Marshall McLuhan
The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.

Marshall McLuhan
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

Marshall McLuhan
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

Marshall McLuhan
Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

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
To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.

Marshall McLuhan
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

Marshall McLuhan