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Marshall McLuhan: 832 quotes16 likes

“The more data banks record about us, the less we exist.”

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

“Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 33

“The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 93

“Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 97

“In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 99

“War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 102

“Every technology contrived and “outered” by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 174

“Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 6

“Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself. This analogical awareness is constituted of a perpetual play of ratios among ratios. A is to B, what C is to D, which is to say the ratio between A and B, is proportionable to the ratio between C and D, there being a ratio between these ratios, as well, this lively awareness of the most exquisite delicacy depends upon there being no connection whatsoever between the components. If A were linked to B, or C to D, mere logic would take the place of analogical perception, thus one of the penalties paid for literacy and a high visual culture is a strong tendency to encounter all things through a rigorous storyline, as it were. Paradoxically, connected spaces and situations exclude participation, whereas discontinuity affords room for involvement. Visual space is connected and creates detachment or non-involvement. It also tends to exclude the participation of the other senses.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Through the Vanishing Point (1968), p.240

“A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 245

“Great ages of innovation are the ages in which entire cultures are junked or scrapped.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 309

“The most human thing about us is our technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Man and the future of organizations, Volume 5, School of Business Administration, Georgia State University, 1974, p. 19
1970s

“The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 61

“Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Ezra Pound (21 December 1948)
1940s

“Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275

“Primitivism has become the vulgar cliche of much modern art and speculation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 77

“After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 443
1970s

“The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)