Marshall McLuhan

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

— Marshall McLuhan

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

— 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

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

— Marshall McLuhan

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-perso n, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener

— Marshall McLuhan

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.

— Marshall McLuhan

In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human…

— 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…

— Marshall McLuhan

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in…

— Marshall McLuhan

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand…

— Marshall McLuhan

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct…

— Marshall McLuhan

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the…

— Marshall McLuhan

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because…

— Marshall McLuhan

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values…

— Marshall McLuhan

One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North--personal responsibility to other human beings for…

— Marshall McLuhan

The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived…

— Marshall McLuhan

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of…

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

— Marshall McLuhan

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“ Playboy : Have you ever taken LSD yourself? McLUHAN : No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.”

— Marshall McLuhan

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot…

— Marshall McLuhan

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these…

— Marshall McLuhan

The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of…

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always…

— Marshall McLuhan

Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect…

— Marshall McLuhan

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the…

— Marshall McLuhan

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone…

— Marshall McLuhan

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

— Marshall McLuhan