Marshall McLuhan - Age Quotes

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If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

Marshall McLuhan
Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.

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

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

Marshall McLuhan
In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

Marshall McLuhan
Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

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
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
In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.

Marshall McLuhan
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.

Marshall McLuhan
The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the unified field of electric all-at-onceness.

Marshall McLuhan
In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

Marshall McLuhan
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

Marshall McLuhan
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

Marshall McLuhan
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

Marshall McLuhan
The Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a new metaphor, restructure our thoughts and feelings.

Marshall McLuhan
On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.

Marshall McLuhan
The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures.

Marshall McLuhan