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Marshall McLuhan Quotes

1911–1980 Canada

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (21 July 1911 – 31 December 1980) was a Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.

Canada
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Also known as: McLuhan, Marshall, Mcluhan

Random Marshall McLuhan quote

348 quotes

The Homeric hero becomes a split-man as he assumes an individual ego. (p. 58)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. (p. 102)

Understanding Media (1964)

The levelling of inflexion and of wordplay became part of the program of applied knowledge in the seventeenth century. (p. 265)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The automated presidential surrogate is the superlative nobody. (p. 157)

Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972)

Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries. (p. 24)

Culture Is Our Business (1970)

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life. (p. 177)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Each new technology is a reprogramming of sensory life. (p. 33)

Counterblast (1969)

The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man. (p. 241)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Until more than two centuries after printing nobody discovered how to maintain a single tone or attitude throughout a prose composition. (p. 154)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure but metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing in terms of another. (p. 298)

The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses. (p. 49)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story. (p. 223)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe. (p. 117)

Understanding Media (1964)

For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.

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.

People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath. (p. 184)

The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

Unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitutes a total and near-instanteous transformation of culture, values and attitudes.

Playboy Interview (1969)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marshall McLuhan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.