Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

[On Jimmy Carter] "Huck Finn. Loss of identity drives people to nostalgia. Electronic man has no physical body, so he puts nostalgia in its place."

McLuhan after his September 1979 stroke. Brand, Stewart. "McLuhan's last words." New Scientist, 29 Jan 1981.

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The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

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

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

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.

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

Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.