Marshall McLuhan Quotes (124 Quotes)

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

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.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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.

The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.

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.

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

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

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

In the name of progress, our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.

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

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

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.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

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

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.

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

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.

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.

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.

The medium is the message.

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

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

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual o.

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Only the vanquished remember history.

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.

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.

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

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

Jokes are grievances.

Affluence creates poverty.

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

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.

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