Marshall McLuhan Quotes

I don't explain—I explore.

When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals. (p. 261)

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter.

Art is whatever you can get away with.

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. [A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead]

All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.

The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (p. 125)

Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. (p. 122)

History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order. (pp. 108-109)

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.