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“The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 274

“The Greek “point of view” in both art and chronology has little in common with ours but was much like that of the Middle Ages.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 64

“At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Forces interview (1973)

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature…The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”

Marshall McLuhan

Media as the New Nature, 1969, p. 14
1960s

“Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 68

“Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 171

“The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 66

“When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.”

Marshall McLuhan

Location, Volume 1 Issues 1-2, 1963, p. 44
1960s

“Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space…it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 13

“It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 9

“Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

“I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.”

Marshall McLuhan

Interview: Tom Wolfe, TVOntario, August 1970
1970s

“Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.9-10

“For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 126

“The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p.12

“Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“Dantzig explains why the language of number had to be increased to meet the needs created by the new technology of letters.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 200

“The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 12

“The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 75