Marshall McLuhan Quotes

When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.

Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

The TV generation is postliterate and retribalized. It seeks by violence to scrub the old private image and to merge in a new tribal identity, like any corporate executive.

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

Only the vanquished remember history.

All media work us over completely.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

Electronic man has no physical body.

Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...

...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.

The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

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

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

The real news is bad news.

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

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

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

The medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

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

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

Logos is the formal cause of the kosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration.

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message

The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

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

Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.

We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.