Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race.

A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor? (p.7)

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)

For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning. (p. 126)

The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature. (p. 14)

The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”

The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography. (p. 128)

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.

Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.

The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present. (p. 193)

All media exists to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values. (p. 199)

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology. (p. 245)