Marshall McLuhan: Man

Marshall McLuhan was Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. Explore interesting quotes on man.
Marshall McLuhan: 832 quotes16 likes

“Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.”

Marshall McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy

Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 245

“The literate man is a sucker for propaganda... You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.”

Marshall McLuhan

1970s, The Education of Mike McManus, TVOntario, December 28 1977

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot… for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

Marshall McLuhan

“Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. (p.46)”

Marshall McLuhan book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Understanding Media (1964)

“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)

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

“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)

“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

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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 interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 21

“Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 30

“In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.”

Marshall McLuhan

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 314