Marshall McLuhan Quotes

At the speed of light there is no sequence; everything happens at the same instant.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

I don't explain—I explore.

Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, “Why do you kids use ‘cool’ to mean ‘hot’?” The friend replied, “Because you folks used up the word ‘hot’ before we came along.

Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made “bad grammar” possible. (p. 263)

All advertising advertises advertising – no ad has its meaning alone. (p. 145)

All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime,

Formal cause, as logos, incorporates the patterns of side-effects as part of essential nature: tetrads restore poesis and the making process to the study of artefacts.

TV is not good at covering single events. It needs a ritual, a rhythm, and a pattern...[TV] tends to fosters patterns rather than events.

First we build the tools, then they build us.

The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance. (p. 263)

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode – a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

Nobody can doubt that the entire range of applied science contributes to the very format of a newspaper. But the headline is a feature which began with the Napoleonic Wars. The headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning, and newspapers have thrived on wars ever since.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

Language is a form of organized stutter.