Marshall McLuhan - Human Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

Marshall McLuhan
The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

Marshall McLuhan
Aretino, like Rabelais and Cervantes, proclaimed the meaning of Typography as Gargantuan, Fantastic, Supra-human.

Marshall McLuhan
Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.

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

Marshall McLuhan
Every technology contrived and outered by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.

Marshall McLuhan
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

Marshall McLuhan
There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.

Marshall McLuhan
When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

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
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
Pornography and obscenity... work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground — situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

Marshall McLuhan
All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.

Marshall McLuhan
In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.

Marshall McLuhan
It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

Marshall McLuhan
At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology.

Marshall McLuhan
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.

Marshall McLuhan
The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man.

Marshall McLuhan
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.

Marshall McLuhan
Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

Marshall McLuhan
The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

Marshall McLuhan
The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.

Marshall McLuhan