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“History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.”

Marshall McLuhan

"A Last Look at the Tube." New York Magazine, 17 March 1978, p. 45-48
1970s

“The new overkill is simply an extension of our nervous system into a total ecological service environment. Such a service environment can liquidate or terminate its beneficiaries as naturally as it sustains them.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 152

“The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Roles, Masks, and Performances", New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 3, Performances in Drama, the Arts, and Society (Spring, 1971), p. 520
1970s

“My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 318
1970s

“Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 149

“Prolonged mimesis of the alphabet and its fragmenting properties produced a new dominant mode of perception and then of culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 17

“A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 49

“Tactility is space of the interval.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 47

“Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Forces interview (1973)

“Bless Madison Ave for restoring the magical art of the cavemen to suburbia.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 130

“My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Robert Fulford, 1964. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 300
1960s
Context: My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

“The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 103

“The increase of visual stress among the Greeks alienated them from the primitive art that the electronic age now reinvents after interiorizing the “unified field” of electric all-at-onceness.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 72

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 113

“In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Innovation is obsolete", Evergreen review, Volume 15, Issues 86-94, Grove Press, 1971, p. 64
1970s

“The media have substituted themselves for the older world.”

Marshall McLuhan

"Education, Language, and Media". Cycle 7, 1973, p. 232
1970s

“Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“I don't explain—I explore.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Hot & Cool (1967)