Marshall McLuhan: Trending quotes

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“Invention is the mother of all necessities.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)

“It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“As the totem pole is tied to the lineality of the missionaries' Bible, so the igloo was made possible by the primus stove.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 168

“The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

“The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.”

Marshall McLuhan

Arts in society, Volume 3, 1964, p. 242
1960s

“In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 211

“Hypnotized by their rear-view mirrors, philosophers and scientists alike tried to focus the figure of man in the old ground of nineteenth-century industrial mechanism and congestion. They failed to bridge from the old figure to the new. It is man who has become both figure and ground via the electrotechnical extension of his awareness. With the extension of his nervous system as a total information environment, man bridges art and nature.</i”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 11

“Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 63

“African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 44

“I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.”

Marshall McLuhan

Cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall
1970s

“There is no connection between the elements in an electric world, which is equivalent to being surrounded by the human unconscious.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 260

“Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 194

“Print created national uniformity and government centralism, but also individualism and opposition to government as such.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 267

“Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 37

“Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Gutenberg made all history available as classified data: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentlemen's library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman's breakfast table.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 15

“A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?”

Marshall McLuhan

A play on the line's in Robert Browning's poem "Andrea del Sarto":
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p.7

“The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 55