Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.

Marshall McLuhan
I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.

Marshall McLuhan
Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

Marshall McLuhan
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

Marshall McLuhan
The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues.

Marshall McLuhan
The culture-heroes of preliteracy and postliteracy alike are robots.

Marshall McLuhan
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

Marshall McLuhan
The pre-atomist multisensory void was an animate, pulsating, and moving vibrant interval, neither container nor contained, acoustic space penetrated by tactility.

Marshall McLuhan
Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind.

Marshall McLuhan
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