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“Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, The Education of Mike McManus, TVOntario, December 28 1977

“Human perception is literally incarnation.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters", in Christian Humanism in Letters, The McAuley Lectures (1954), p. 49-67
1950s

“At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

“Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.77

“Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 33

“All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 145

“We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 276

“Language is a sense, like touch. (p. 271)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 103

“Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 105

“Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 223

“When Coleridge said that all men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians, he was saying that all men tend to be either acoustic or visual in their sensory bias.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 113

“Headlines are icons, not literature.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 5

“Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 106

“Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 267

“The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 205

“Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
1970s

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

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 231

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 21

“Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.”

Marshall McLuhan

from a 1960 report to the National Educational Broadcasters Association, quoted in Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger by Philip Marchand, p. 148
1960s