Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Human perception is literally incarnation.

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

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

The Concept of Dread, by Soren Kierkegaard, appeared in 1844, first year of the commercial telegraph...It mentions the telegraph as a reason for dread and nowness or existenz.

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)

The person who falls suddenly experiences immunity to all pain or sensory stimuli because the central nervous system has to be protected from any intense thrust of sensation. Only gradually does he regain normal sensitivity to sights and sounds, at which time he may begin to tremble and perspire and to react as he would have done if the central nervous system had been prepared in advance for the fall that occurred unexpectedly.

The typographic lore of school children points to the gap between the scribal and typographic man. (p. 103)

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

Since Sputnik, the earth has been wrapped in a dome-like blanket or bubble. Nature ended.

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

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.

Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes.

The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)

The mother tongue is propaganda.

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.