Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

We begin again to structure the primordial feelings...from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us. We begin again to live a myth. (p. 17)

"Oddly enough, it is a consumer-oriented culture that is concerned about authors and labels of authenticity. Manuscript culture was producer-ori-ented, almost entirely a do-it-yourself culture, and naturally looked to the relevance and usability of items rather than their sources. Not only was private authorship in the later print meanings unknown, but there was no reading public in our sense, either. This is a matter that has usually been confused with ideas about "the extent of literacy." But even if literacy were universal, under manuscript conditions an author would still have no public. An advanced scientist today has no public. He has a few friends and colleagues with whom he talks about his work. What we need to have in mind is that the manuscript book was slow to read and slow to move or be circulated."

I don't explain—I explore.

The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness. (p.45)

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

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

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement. (p. 81)

I am a pattern watcher. (p. 311)

Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. (p. 109)

Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery — to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.