Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

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.

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.

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

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

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

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

Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

Information and images bump against each other every day in massive quantities, and the resonance of this interfacing is like the babble of a village or tavern gossip session.

Our permanent address is tommorrow.

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton.

Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.

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

The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

Fish did not discover water.

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.

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

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.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

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

The real news is bad news.

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.

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by the electric media--movies, Telstar, flight--far surpassesany possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening

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

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