Marshall McLuhan Quotes

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

All advertising advertises advertising.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

The story begins only when the book closes.

Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contactspainful and revolting.

The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.

For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

All media work us over completely.

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

... Their power to see environments as they really are.

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 hula-hoop.

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar

With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

The 'content' of any medium is always another medium.

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

Only the vanquished remember history.

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. 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.

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.

Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

Human perception is literally incarnation.

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

The medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.

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

I'm not sure who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social.

The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

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