Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

Add quote

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

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Native Name: Herbert Marshall McLuhan

Alternative Names: Marshall MacLuhan • Marshall Mac Luhan

From Wikidata (CC0)

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth.

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

The unformulated message of an assembly of news items from every quarter of the globe is that the world today is one city. All war is civil war. All suffering is our own.

We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.

Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.

New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown.

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.

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

Each tetrad gives the etymology of its subject, as an uttering or outering of the body physical or mental, and provides its anatomy in fourfold exegetical manner.

With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.

The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.'