Marshall McLuhan - Man Quotes

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

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
For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.

Marshall McLuhan
Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

Marshall McLuhan
Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided 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
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 new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature... The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

Marshall McLuhan
Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe.

Marshall McLuhan
All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.

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

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

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

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