Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

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

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
The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.

Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

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
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
The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page.

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 electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.

Marshall McLuhan
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Marshall McLuhan
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

Marshall McLuhan
Bless advertising art for its pictorial vitality and verbal creativity.

Marshall McLuhan
The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.

Marshall McLuhan
The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

Marshall McLuhan
The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.

Marshall McLuhan
Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

Marshall McLuhan
Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.

Marshall McLuhan
The new science of communication is percept, not concept.

Marshall McLuhan
History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order.

Marshall McLuhan
Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.

Marshall McLuhan
The copy [of an ad] is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the [product] goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

Marshall McLuhan
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

Marshall McLuhan
Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

Marshall McLuhan
The typographic logic created the outsider, the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.

Marshall McLuhan
Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.

Marshall McLuhan
Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

Marshall McLuhan
The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.

Marshall McLuhan