The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.
Marshall McLuhanWhy is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones
Marshall McLuhanFood for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
Marshall McLuhanToday, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.
Marshall McLuhanThe successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.
Marshall McLuhanI am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.
Marshall McLuhanScribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.
Marshall McLuhanRelativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
Marshall McLuhanViolence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
Marshall McLuhanAll meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.
Marshall McLuhanThe young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.
Marshall McLuhanThe literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.
Marshall McLuhanIn television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
Marshall McLuhanWhen information rubs against information the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.
Marshall McLuhanThe past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
Marshall McLuhanLiteracy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
Marshall McLuhanSentimentality, like pornography, is fragmented emotion; a natural consequence of a high visual gradient in any culture.
Marshall McLuhanOurs 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. ... The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhanTo say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
Marshall McLuhanToday's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules.
Marshall McLuhanCanadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.
Marshall McLuhanIn 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.
Marshall McLuhanIt has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it
Marshall McLuhanArtists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.
Marshall McLuhanAll media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
Marshall McLuhanIn 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.
Marshall McLuhanThe global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
Marshall McLuhanAds are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.
Marshall McLuhanI do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Marshall McLuhanTelevision is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.
Marshall McLuhanIt is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.
Marshall McLuhanRadio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.
Marshall McLuhan...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.
Marshall McLuhan