Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age. (p. 272)

We are numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 16)

Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour.

We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture. (p. 9)

We are swiftly moving at present from an era where business was our culture into an era when culture will be our business. Between these poles stand the huge and ambiguous entertainment industries. (p. 384)

The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren’t going somewhere, you’re already there. On the telephone you’re not going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we’re already there.
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Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice. (p. 24)

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

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment — of what's really going on — affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. (p. 26)

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

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. (p. 298)

The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.