Marshall McLuhan Quotes
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.
The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.
The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.
Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.
The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.
It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it
The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.
All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.
For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.