Marshall McLuhan Quotes

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Our technology forces us to live mythically

— Marshall McLuhan

“Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Art is whatever you can get away with.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“They will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities.
McLuhan CD-ROM”

— Marshall McLuhan

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror.
Speech is a social chart of this bog.

— Marshall McLuhan

I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that's all. You don't come into the Church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the Church: they have quit praying.
Actively relating to the Church's prayer and sacraments is not done through ideas. Any Catholic today who has an intellectual disagreement with the Church has an illusion. You cannot have an intellectual disagreement with the Church: that's meaningless. The Church is not an intellectual institution. It is a superhuman institution.

— Marshall McLuhan

“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

— Marshall McLuhan

“Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Jokes are grievances.”

— Marshall McLuhan

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

— Marshall McLuhan

“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“When information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“Technology is that which separates us from our environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan

People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

— Marshall McLuhan

“The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up
thatis our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Even mud gives the illusion of depth.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Life. Consider the alternative.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.”

— Marshall McLuhan

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

— Marshall McLuhan

“Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

— Marshall McLuhan

“There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends,”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also
patterns of communal interdependence.

— Marshall McLuhan

Human perception is literally incarnation.

— Marshall McLuhan

“The percept takes priority of the concept.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.

— Marshall McLuhan

“The victory over Euclidean space was not achieved by isolated individuals, but by a field of young rebels opposed to all absolutes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

— Marshall McLuhan

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

— Marshall McLuhan

“Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.”

— Marshall McLuhan