Marshall Mcluhan Quotes

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

All words, in every language, are metaphors. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

There is no more great men; there is only great committees. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr ~ Marshall McLuhan

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put. ~ Marshall McLuhan

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced. ~ Anthony Burgess

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

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn't afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines. ~ Viv Albertine

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening ~ Marshall McLuhan

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.' ~ Marshall McLuhan

The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain antisocial power is manifest in the famous story "The Emperor's New Clothes". ~ Marshall McLuhan

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody. ~ Marshall McLuhan

I do not explain, I explore. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. ~ Marshall McLuhan

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Jokes are grievances. ~ 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

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity. ~ 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 winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds. ~ Marshall McLuhan

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

The 'content' of any medium is always another medium. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

Money is just the poor man's credit card. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it ~ Marshall McLuhan

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools - with yesterday's concepts. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan predicted books would become art objects at some point. He was right. ~ Woody Allen

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Their power to see environments as they really are. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is corporate form of art and the goal is to make an effect. Every artist- any painter, any poet or musician sets out to create an effect, he sets a trap to catch somebody`s attention. That is the nature of art. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The wheel ... is an extension of the foot.
The book ... is an extension of the eye ...
Clothing, an extension of the skin ...
Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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 ... ~ Marshall McLuhan

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery.
The politician will be only too happy to abdicate
in favor of his image, because the image will
be much more powerful than he could ever be. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

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

They will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. ~ Marshall McLuhan

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. ~ Marshall McLuhan

I am a Christian according to my conscience in belief,in purpose and wish;Mnot of course by the orthodox standard. But I am content, and have a feeling of trust and safety.
The Machiavellian mind and the merchant mind are at one in their simple faith in the power of segmental division to rule all
in the dichotomy of power and morals and of money and morals. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception. ~ 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, by terror.
Speech is a social chart of this bog. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules. ~ Marshall McLuhan

For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. ~ Richard Barbrook

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

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration. ~ Marshall McLuhan

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. ~ Marshall McLuhan

One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram
remain inaccessible to this state of mind. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Electronic man has no physical body. ~ 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

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village. ~ Marshall McLuhan

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors ... Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects. ~ Marshall McLuhan

You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it? ~ Marshall McLuhan

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers. ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror. ~ Margaret Atwood

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. ~ Marshall McLuhan

if it works it's obsolete ~ Marshall McLuhan

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. ~ Marshall McLuhan