Marshall McLuhan Quotes

What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

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.

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.

At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church - what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn't rest. Either it ws true, or it wasn't. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing.

The matter had to be tested - on its own terms: that is, by prayer. He told me that the principal prayer that he used was not some long or complex formula, but simply, "Lord, please, send me a sign." He reported that, almost immediately, not one but a deluge of signs arrived. And they continued to arrive unabated for a long time. As to just what the signs consisted in and what happened next, well, some things must remain private. The reader may deduce the rest from the fact of his conversion. ...
-- Eric McLuhan, introduction

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

We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment - of what's really going on - affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.

You and I are faced with one of those situations (which fortunately are not very numerous in one lifetime) which cannot possibly be adequately judged beforehand. It strikes me as a colossal gamble, or rather, a very great adventure. And personally I am considerably exhilarated by the risks! ... The greatness of the adventure perhaps consists partly in the fact that as a Catholic I can marry only once! But, as with being born, perhaps once is quite sufficient! In the Church, you know, there is a great heightening of every moment of experience, since every moment is played against a supernatural backdrop. Nothing can be humdrum in this scheme.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

The future of work consists of learning a living.

Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

if it works it's obsolete

Our permanent address is tommorrow.

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

When information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.

Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.

The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.

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.

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

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.

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration ...

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

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

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

In the "Republic," Plato vigorously attacked the oral, poetized form as a vehicle for communicating knowledge. He pleaded for a more precise method of communication and classification ("The Ideas"), one which would favor the investigation of facts, principles of reality, human nature, and conduct. What the Greeks meant by "poetry" was radically different from what we mean by poetry. Their "poetic" expression was a product of a collective psyche and mind. The mimetic form, a technique that exploited rhythm, meter and music, achieved the desired psychological response in the listener. Listeners could memorize with greater ease what was sung than what was said. Plato attacked this method because it discouraged disputation and argument. It was in his opinion the chief obstacle to abstract, speculative reasoning - he called it "a poison, and an enemy of the people.

Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian ... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.

When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

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.

Theirs is the customary human reaction when confronted with innovation: to flounder about attempting to adapt old responses to new situations or to simply condemn or ignore the harbingers of change
a practice refined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us

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

I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties ...

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.

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.

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

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.

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

The "child" was an invention of the 17th century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense.

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny - if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image - tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology ... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.