Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.

Marshall McLuhan
A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?

Marshall McLuhan
As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.

Marshall McLuhan
The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man.

Marshall McLuhan
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception... When these ratios change, men change.

Marshall McLuhan
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound.

Marshall McLuhan
TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

Marshall McLuhan
Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

Marshall McLuhan
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

Marshall McLuhan
Color is not so much a visual as a tactile medium.

Marshall McLuhan
Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave.

Marshall McLuhan
America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB: CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the USA.

Marshall McLuhan
When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?

Marshall McLuhan
The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.

Marshall McLuhan
We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

Marshall McLuhan
The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.

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
Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.

Marshall McLuhan
The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.

Marshall McLuhan
Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.

Marshall McLuhan
Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.

Marshall McLuhan
With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.

Marshall McLuhan
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Marshall McLuhan
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Marshall McLuhan
The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement.

Marshall McLuhan
In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.

Marshall McLuhan
The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.

Marshall McLuhan
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not the battlefields of Vietnam.

Marshall McLuhan
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

Marshall McLuhan