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
An expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. 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. Any expensive ad is as carefully built on the tested foundations of public stereotypes or 'sets' of established attitudes, as any skyscraper is built on bedrock.

Marshall McLuhan
Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

Marshall McLuhan
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Marshall McLuhan
One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.

Marshall McLuhan
The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.

Marshall McLuhan
The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.

Marshall McLuhan
Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

Marshall McLuhan
There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.

Marshall McLuhan
Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.

Marshall McLuhan
The Concept of Dread, by Søren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph... It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.

Marshall McLuhan
The uniformity and repeatability of print created the political arithmetic of the seventeenth century and the hedonistic calculus of the eighteenth.

Marshall McLuhan
African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.

Marshall McLuhan
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

Marshall McLuhan
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.

Marshall McLuhan
The magic of the cave image lies in its being, not in its being seen. The symbolic does not refer. It is.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages.

Marshall McLuhan
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

Marshall McLuhan
The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

Marshall McLuhan
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

Marshall McLuhan
Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition.

Marshall McLuhan
The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.

Marshall McLuhan
Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marshall McLuhan