Quotes by
Marshall McLuhan |
1911-1980 , Canadian academic & media theorist
Canadian philosopher, futurist, and media theorist. His work is one of the cornerstones of media theory.McLuhan coined the expression “the medium is the message” and “global village”, and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s.
| 76 quotes | 2,102 visits |
Quotations
| • | The medium is the message. 8 |
| • | There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. 5 |
| • | All advertising advertises advertising. 4 |
| • | African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film. 3 |
| • | War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. 3 |
| • | Our permanent address is tomorrow. 3 |
| • | Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind. (Letter to Ezra Pound, 21 December 1948) |
| • | Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally. |
| • | In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. |
| • | The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. |
| • | Non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training. |
| • | The Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. |
| • | A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space. |
| • | In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud. |
| • | Rabelais offers a vision of the future of print culture as a consumer's paradise of applied knowledge. |
| • | The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. |
| • | Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. |
| • | It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour. |
| • | The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. |
| • | The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers. |
| • | Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. |
| • | Headlines are icons, not literature. |
| • | To the blind all things are sudden. |
| • | Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition. |
| • | Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today. |
| • | I’ve always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened. |
| • | The percept takes priority of the concept. |
| • | The most human thing about us is our technology. |
| • | Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century. |
| • | One of the things that happens at the speed of light is that people lose their goals in life. So what takes the place of goals and objectives? Well, role-playing is coming in very fast. |
| • | All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody. |
| • | The 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. |
| • | All words, in every language, are metaphors. |
| • | The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. |
| • | The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. |
| • | I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say. |
| • | Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers. |
| • | Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools! |
| • | We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. |
| • | A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about. |
| • | Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment. |
| • | Art is anything you can get away with. |
| • | First we build the tools, then they build us. |
| • | We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future. |
| • | Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness. |
| • | We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish. |
| • | Our technology forces us to live mythically. |
| • | Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be. |
| • | Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. |
| • | The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound. |
| • | If it works it’s obsolete. |
| • | Advertisements constitute the only “good news” in the newspaper. |
| • | The “child” was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare’s day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. |
| • | Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions |
| • | The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist. |
| • | There are many people for whom “thinking” necessarily means identifying with existing trends. |
| • | Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either. |
| • | I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it. |
| • | Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure. |
| • | Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence. |
| • | As a rule, I always look for what others ignore. |
| • | It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness. |
| • | Money is a poor man’s credit card. |
| • | Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. |
| • | I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt. |
| • | Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. |
| • | The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. |
| • | The answers are always inside the problem, not outside. |
| • | The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially. |
| • | I do not explain, I explore. |
| • | The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man. |
| • | The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system. |
| • | Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval. |
| • | The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf. |
