Marshall McLuhan Quotes

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us

Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.

TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

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

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr

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

If it works, it's obsolete.

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

I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.

For the satiated, both sex and speed are pretty boring until the element of danger and even death is introduced.

People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody.

Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed.

Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

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

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.

Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

First we build the tools, then they build us.

The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

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

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.

Innovation for holders of conventional wisdom is not novelty but annihilation.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself".

What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.

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 individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.