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“Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 183

“The audience, as ground, shapes and controls the work of art.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 48

“The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 210

“Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 41

“Sentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968)

“Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

“PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. “LSD doesn’t mean anything until you consume it,” she said. “Likewise McLuhan.” Do you see any similarities?
McLUHAN: I’m flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Commonweal, Vol. 58 (1953), p. 557
1950s

“Sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal hoard. The box office looms as a return to the echo chamber of bardic incantation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 288

“The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Edward T. Hall, 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 397
1970s

“The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 8

“Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 43

“The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 265

“Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 67

“I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.”

Marshall McLuhan