Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

Art is the sole means of grace in our fallen state.

War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.

The ear favours no particular “point of view.”
We are enveloped by sound.

It forms a seamless web around us.

We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus.

Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.”

We can‘t shut out sound automatically.

We simply are not equipped with earlids.

Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

Playboy: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?
McLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.

"Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools — with yesterday's concepts."

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment — of what's really going on — affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.

In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren’t going somewhere, you’re already there. On the telephone you’re not going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we’re already there.
McLuhan CD-ROM

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.

I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the Church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the Church: they have quit praying.

Actively relating to the Church's prayer and sacraments is not done through ideas. Any Catholic today who has an intellectual disagreement with the Church has an illusion. You cannot have an intellectual disagreement with the Church: that's meaningless. The Church is not an intellectual institution. It is a superhuman institution.

The stars are so big,
The Earth is so small,

Stay as you are.