Skip to content

Marshall McLuhan Quotes

1911–1980 Canada

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

Canada
Academics
Essayists
Historians
Philosophers

Also known as: McLuhan, Marshall, Mcluhan

Random Marshall McLuhan quote

348 quotes

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

The existential trauma had a physical basis in the first electric extension of our nervous system.

Culture Is Our Business (1970)

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.

The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)

All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy. (p. 154)

Understanding Media (1964)

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

The Medium is the Massage (1967)

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (p. 8)

Understanding Media (1964)

Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge. (p. 171)

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement. We lose "touch" without it. Visual space is the space of detachment.

Culture Is Our Business (1970)

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

Forces interview (1973)

Omnipresence has become an ordinary human dimension.

Forces interview (1973)

We are not Argus-eyed, but Argus-eared.

Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988)

We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.

The Agenbite of Outwit (1998)

Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

The Medium is the Massage (1967)

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

The Medium is the Massage (1967)

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

The Medium is the Massage (1967)

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance. (p. 263)

Understanding Media (1964)

While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)

The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

Attribution

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