Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

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

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