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“The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 362

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of culture, as Harold Innis was the first to show.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 56

“Acoustic space is totally discontinuous, like touch. It is a sphere without centers or margins.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“Typography cracked the voices of silence.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 283

“To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 40

“With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 191

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 23

“The mother tongue is propaganda.”

Marshall McLuhan

The University of Windsor review, Volumes 1-2, 1965, p. 10
1960s

“The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive. (p. 201)”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 47

“Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 298

“The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 216; McLuhan here quotes "Minerva's Owl" (1947), by Innis, an address to the Royal Society of Canada, published in The Bias of Communication (1951)

“For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 85; "Magic that Changes Mood")

“[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."”

Marshall McLuhan

Brand, Stewart. "McLuhan's last words". New Scientist, 29 Jan 1981.
1980s

“If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 31

“The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 154

“The “interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 161

“Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 303

“For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.”

Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
1980s and later