Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

By involving all men in all men, by the electric extension of their own nervous systems, the new technology turns the figure of the primitive society into a universal ground that buries all previous figures.

Marshall McLuhan
Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.

Marshall McLuhan
Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.

Marshall McLuhan
Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space... it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.

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
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
Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.

Marshall McLuhan
The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.

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

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

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

Marshall McLuhan
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

Marshall McLuhan
Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.

Marshall McLuhan
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Marshall McLuhan
By phonemic transformation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

Marshall McLuhan
Our book technology has Gutenberg at one end and the Ford assembly lines at the other. Both are obsolete.

Marshall McLuhan
The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations.

Marshall McLuhan
Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

Marshall McLuhan
The Greek point of view in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages.

Marshall McLuhan
The computer is by all odds the most extraordinary of all the technological clothing ever devised by man, since it is the extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

Marshall McLuhan
The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

Marshall McLuhan
We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.

Marshall McLuhan
We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.

Marshall McLuhan
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Marshall McLuhan