Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

Marshall McLuhan
Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?

Marshall McLuhan
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Marshall McLuhan
The natural magic of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package.

Marshall McLuhan
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

Marshall McLuhan
The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.

Marshall McLuhan
When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan
Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

Marshall McLuhan