Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The “hard” sell and the “hot” line become mere comedy in the TV age, and the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself. America, in fact, would seem to be living through the reverse process that Margaret Mead described in Time magazine (September 4, 1954): “There are too many complaints about society having to move too fast to keep up with the machine. There is great advantage in moving fast if you move completely, if social, educational, and recreational changes keep pace. You must change the whole pattern at once and the whole group together — and the people themselves must decide to move.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. (p. 26)

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

if it works it's obsolete

At no period of human culture have men understood the psychic mechanism involved in invention and technology. (p. 300)

When you move into a new area, a new territory and learn a new language, the language is not a new subject, it is an environment, it is total. (p. 105)

Invention is the mother of all necessities.

The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (p. 370)

"There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for "content" are illusioned."

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 media have substituted themselves for the older world.

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

The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. (p. 8)

Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.