Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed.

The story begins only when the book closes.

I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think.

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting.

There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures.

The 'content' of any medium is always another medium.

Human perception is literally incarnation.

Nothing is inevitable if we are willing to contemplate what is happening.

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

Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

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

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

I'm not sure who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish.

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.

Life. Consider the alternative.

Nobody can commit photography alone.

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

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.

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

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

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.

Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.

Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.

... Their power to see environments as they really are.

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.

Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he [Jimmy Carter] puts nostalgia in its place.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.