Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death?

Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it.

Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes.

The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends,

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.

The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.

The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

Even mud gives the illusion of depth.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

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

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

Our motor car is our supreme form of privacy when we are away from home.

if it works it's obsolete

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.

We impose the form of the old on the content of the new.

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,

Stay as you are.

Electronic man has no physical body.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.

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

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-perso n, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

Our permanent address is tommorrow.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

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

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought.

The real news is bad news.

Their power to see environments as they really are.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

Arists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

To say that a body or its gravitational field 'bends in space' in its vicinity is the discuss visual space in acoustic terms.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's problems.

Only the vanquished remember history.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones

Language is a form of organized stutter.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.

Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is', whether chemical, psychic or social, involves touch.

I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think.

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.

One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

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

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message

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

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.