Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Cultural dominance by either the left or the right hemisphere is largely dependent upon environmental factors.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar. (p.46)

The potential of any new technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors. (p. 210)

Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.

My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.

The “natural magic” of the camera obscura anticipated Hollywood in turning the spectacle of the external world into a consumer commodity or package. (p. 146)

if it works it's obsolete

Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.

It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. (p. 9)

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

Bacon's Adam is a medieval mystic and Milton's a trade union organizer. (p. 214)

Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things. (p. 90)