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Marshall McLuhan Quotes
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Herbert Marshall McLuhan, was a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge; he began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto, where he remained for the rest of his life.

McLuhan is known for coining the expression "the medium is the message" and the term global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years after his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, however, interest was renewed in his work and perspective.

✵ 21. July 1911 – 31. December 1980
Marshall McLuhan photo
Marshall McLuhan: 416   quotes 16   likes

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 98

Personality

“Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 62

“The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 286

“The logos of creation, 'And God Said…' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 217

God , Books , Nature

“Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”

Marshall McLuhan

American scholar, Volume 35, 1965, p. 200
1960s

Change

“Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 132

“The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication…is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.”

Marshall McLuhan

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
1950s

Art , Feeling , Communication , Business

“As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

Love

“The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 14

Nature

“The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 263

“The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 346

“New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 229

“People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.”

Marshall McLuhan

ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
1960s

People , Change

“Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

Age

“Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 224

“The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable “commodity,” the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 142

Knowledge

“McLuhan after his September 1979 stroke. Brand, Stewart. "McLuhan's last words." New Scientist, 29 Jan 1981.”

Marshall McLuhan

Boyoboy oboyoboy oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy...
1980s

“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

Music , Painting

“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

Age , Art

“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)

Personality , Speed

“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

Knowledge , Perfection

“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

Women , Men , World , Way

“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)

Universe

“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

Home , Teachers

“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

Change

“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

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

Marshall McLuhan

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)

Way , Knowledge , Thinking

“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)

Youth , Understanding

“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

War , Change , Time

“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

War , Change

“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

Speed

“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

Penalty , Sense , Strong , Dependency

“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

Understanding

“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

Age