Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.

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

Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.

A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

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.

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.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

The medium is the message.

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.

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.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

Jokes are grievances.

Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.

Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

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.

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

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

Most clear writing is a sign that there is no exploration going on. Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.

The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.

Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.

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.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

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

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

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