Marshall McLuhan Quotes

442 Sourced Quotes

The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.

Marshall McLuhan
We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries.

Marshall McLuhan
The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.

Marshall McLuhan
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

Marshall McLuhan
Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.

Marshall McLuhan
The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.

Marshall McLuhan
Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.

Marshall McLuhan
Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.

Marshall McLuhan
With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.

Marshall McLuhan
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

Marshall McLuhan
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Marshall McLuhan
The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement.

Marshall McLuhan
Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere.

Marshall McLuhan
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

Marshall McLuhan
The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.

Marshall McLuhan
Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography.

Marshall McLuhan
Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan
Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.

Marshall McLuhan
There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

Marshall McLuhan
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Marshall McLuhan
The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

Marshall McLuhan
The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.

Marshall McLuhan
People don't actually read newspapers. They get into them every morning, like a hot bath.

Marshall McLuhan
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

Marshall McLuhan
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

Marshall McLuhan
The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

Marshall McLuhan
[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."

Marshall McLuhan
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not the battlefields of Vietnam.

Marshall McLuhan
The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.

Marshall McLuhan