Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar (1911–1980)

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (21 July 1911 – 31 December 1980) was a Canadian philosopher, futurist, and communications theorist.

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Native Name: Herbert Marshall McLuhan

Alternative Names: Marshall MacLuhan • Marshall Mac Luhan

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The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity. (p. 135)

Q: Do you feel a need to be distinctive and mass-produced? Q: Are you in the groove? That is, are you moving in ever-diminishing circles? Q: How often do you change your mind, your politics, your clothes? (p. 121-125)

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)

The electronic age is a world in which causes and effects become almost interchangeable, as in music structures. (p. 99)

There are no connections in resonant space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses. (p. 75)

The unique innovation of the phonetic alphabet released the Greeks from the universal acoustic spill of tribal societies. (p. 70)

Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind. (p. 67)

Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible. (p. 33)

The role of the artist is to create an Anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment. (p. 31)

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication. (p. 23)

While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world. (p. 21)

The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.

When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.

As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.

We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.