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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 Greeks invented both their artistic and scientific novelties after the interiorization of the alphabet. (p. 66)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

By electricity we have not been driven out of our senses so much as our senses have been driven out of us. (p. 375)

The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish. (p. 5)

Counterblast (1969)

Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space...it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark. (p. 13)

Counterblast (1969)

Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society. (p. 271)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)

Understanding Media (1964)

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies. (p. 114)

Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972)

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form. (p. 180)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)

Understanding Media (1964)

The uniformity and repeatability of print created the “political arithmetic” of the seventeenth century and the “hedonistic calculus” of the eighteenth. (p. 237)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Radio comes to us ostensibly with person to person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magic power to touch remote and forgotten chords. (p. 302).

Understanding Media (1964)

Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.

Understanding Media (1964)

I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.

Playboy Interview (1969)

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order. (p. 303)

The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

Our senses are not receptors so much as reactors and makers of different modalities of space. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind. (p. 256)

The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

Scribal culture could have neither authors nor publics such as were created by typography. (p. 149)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on. (p. 120)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

With TV, came the icon, the inclusive image, the inclusive political posture or stance. (p. 191)

The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare. (p. 230)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

Attribution

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