Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes

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“Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning.”

Marshall McLuhan

1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)

“Until now a culture has been a mechanical fate for societies, the automatic interiorization of their own technologies.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 86

“The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.45

“The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“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.”

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
1980s

“We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

“Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

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

Marshall McLuhan

quoted in "Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared 'Medium Is the Message'" by Alden Whitman, The New York Times, January 1, 1981
1980s

“When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

“Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 133

“Casting my perils before swains.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Hot & Cool (1967)

“The telegraph press mosaic is acoustic space as much as an electric circus.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.202

“Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.”

Marshall McLuhan

Variant: Until writing was invented, we lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion, primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 13)
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 13

“Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 302

“The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it’s the universal experience of TV watchers.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“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

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 90

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 121

“Cervantes confronted typographic man in the figure of Don Quixote.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 242

“The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 291