Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.

Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that.

Marshall McLuhan
The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

Marshall McLuhan
The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.

Marshall McLuhan
World War I a railway war of centralization and encirclement. World War II a radio war of decentralization concluded by the Bomb. World War III a TV guerrilla war with no divisions between civil and military fronts.

Marshall McLuhan
Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

Marshall McLuhan
The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels.

Marshall McLuhan
All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Marshall McLuhan
The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.

Marshall McLuhan
Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness... This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

Marshall McLuhan
The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness.

Marshall McLuhan
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

Marshall McLuhan
It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.

Marshall McLuhan
The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic forces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within.

Marshall McLuhan
The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication... is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

Marshall McLuhan
The family circle has widened. The world pool of information fathered by the electric media - movies, Telstar, flight - far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.
Sometimes quoted as.. "whirlpool of information"

Marshall McLuhan
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