Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

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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 anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)

King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)

Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature - they are nature...The new media are not ways of relating us to the old world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational.

People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.

The present is always invisible because it's environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

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

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

The mother tongue is propaganda.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

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 TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.