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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
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Marshall McLuhan: 416 quotes16 likes

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“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)

“War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 381

“The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 157

“Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 72

“All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 178-179

“The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 241

“The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 76

“One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast.”

Marshall McLuhan

Interview between Californian Governor Jerry Brown and Marshall McLuhan, 1977
1970s

“Interdeterminacy was a figure-ground problem arising from incongruity between the visual bias of classical science and the new acoustic sensibilities.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 44

“The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“The new science of communication is percept, not concept.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 259

“Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 171

“By surpassing writing, we have regained our wholeness, not on a national or cultural but cosmic plane.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

“We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 16

“Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness…This is a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 24

“Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

“The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 360

“In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 4

“The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 334

“We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation.”

Marshall McLuhan

xx
1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

“In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.”

Marshall McLuhan

Variant: In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)
Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 125

“If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures…and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.””

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 264

“Chinese script is not visual but iconic and tactile. It does not disturb the tribal bonds.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 72

“Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception…When these ratios change, men change.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 96

“The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.”

Marshall McLuhan

JQ. Journalism quarterly, Volume 50, Association for Education in Journalism, 1973, p. 145
1970s

“We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 69

“The manuscript shaped medieval literary conventions at all levels.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 99

“Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, A McLuhan Sourcebook (1995), p. 273

“It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 53

“The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 106

“Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixations of languages.”

Marshall McLuhan

Variant: Typography extended its character to the regulation and fixation of languages. (p. 229)
Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 260

“The only cool PR is provided by one's enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.”

Marshall McLuhan

88
1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.”

Marshall McLuhan

1960s, Playboy Interview (1969)

“Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1950s, The Mechanical Bride (1951), p. 7

“Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 38

“The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 227

“Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 154

“All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970)

“The young are really the heirs to a generation of incompetence.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

“Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.”

Marshall McLuhan

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

“The percept takes priority of the concept.”

Marshall McLuhan

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