Marshall McLuhan Quotes

257 quotes in 2591 categories

• Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
• The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
• Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with…
• The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
• Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
• The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere…
• The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life.…
• Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones
• Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of…
• The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.
• Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening.…
• I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
• Life. Consider the alternative.
• The real news is bad news.
• If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might…
• The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
• Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.
• I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.
• The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.
• By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds

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