Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of U.S.A. - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Marshall McLuhan

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation violence is the natural recourse.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Marshall McLuhan

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Marshall McLuhan

Money is the poor people's credit card.

Marshall McLuhan

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity and this is one of our marvellous resources.

Marshall McLuhan

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

Marshall McLuhan

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Marshall McLuhan

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

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 job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function. McLuhan CD-ROM

Marshall McLuhan

The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities. McLuhan CD-ROM

Marshall McLuhan

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren’t going somewhere, you’re already there. On the telephone you’re not going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we’re already there. McLuhan CD-ROM

Marshall McLuhan

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 media work us over completely.

Marshall McLuhan

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the Church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the Church: they have quit praying.Actively relating to the Church's prayer and sacraments is not done through ideas. Any Catholic today who has an intellectual disagreement with the Church has an illusion. You cannot have an intellectual disagreement with the Church: that's meaningless. The Church is not an intellectual institution. It is a superhuman institution.

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

Marshall McLuhan

if it works it's obsolete

Marshall McLuhan

First we build the tools, then they build us.

Marshall McLuhan

Our technology forces us to live mythically

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

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

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.

Marshall McLuhan

I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.

Marshall McLuhan

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Marshall McLuhan

In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Marshall McLuhan

Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on 'substance'. The dramatic and rapid changes of 'substance' elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view - the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.

Marshall McLuhan

The ear favours no particular “point of view.”We are enveloped by sound.It forms a seamless web around us.We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.”We can‘t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

Marshall McLuhan

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

Only the vanquished remember history.

Marshall McLuhan

Art is anything you can get away with.

Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Marshall McLuhan

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.

Marshall McLuhan

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Marshall McLuhan

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Marshall McLuhan

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!

Marshall McLuhan

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding.

Marshall McLuhan

Art is whatever you can get away with.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan