Marshall McLuhan - Man Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

View all Marshall McLuhan Quotes
For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Marshall McLuhan
The hallucinogenic world, in environmental terms, can be considered as a forlorn effort of man to match the speed of power of hisextended nervous system (which we call the "electronic world") by intensifying the activity of his inner nervous system.

Marshall McLuhan
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire.

Marshall McLuhan
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

Marshall McLuhan
In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man's physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations.

Marshall McLuhan
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.

Marshall McLuhan
All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.

Marshall McLuhan
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

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
Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

Marshall McLuhan
All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.

Marshall McLuhan
The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man.

Marshall McLuhan
A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?

Marshall McLuhan
The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.

Marshall McLuhan
Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

Marshall McLuhan
The literate man is a sucker for propaganda... You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

Marshall McLuhan
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

Marshall McLuhan
Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.

Marshall McLuhan
The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego.

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
Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a man-made environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."

Marshall McLuhan
The typographic logic created the outsider, the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.

Marshall McLuhan
To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

Marshall McLuhan
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

Marshall McLuhan
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Marshall McLuhan
Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.

Marshall McLuhan
Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote.

Marshall McLuhan
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

Marshall McLuhan
We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.

Marshall McLuhan