Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on 'substance'. The dramatic and rapid changes of 'substance' elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view - the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.

The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities.

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Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race.

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.

Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery — to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

Homer’s Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.

You and I are faced with one of those situations (which fortunately are not very numerous in one lifetime) which cannot possibly be adequately judged beforehand. It strikes me as a colossal gamble, or rather, a very great adventure. And personally I am considerably exhilarated by the risks! ... The greatness of the adventure perhaps consists partly in the fact that as a Catholic I can marry only once! But, as with being born, perhaps once is quite sufficient! In the Church, you know, there is a great heightening of every moment of experience, since every moment is played against a supernatural backdrop. Nothing can be humdrum in this scheme.

Our time is a time to cross barriers, for erasing old categories — for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result

Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, “Why do you kids use ‘cool’ to mean ‘hot’?” The friend replied, “Because you folks used up the word ‘hot’ before we came along.

"At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would encounter the Church — what Chesterton called (another book title) The Thing. It was everywhere. At one point, he later told me (and he was never very specific just when that point occurred), he decided that the thing had to be sorted out or he couldn't rest. Either it ws true, or it wasn't. Either the entire matter was true, all of it, exactly as the Church claimed, or it was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible mankind. With that choice clearly delineated, he set out to find which was the case. What came next was not more study, but testing.

The matter had to be tested — on its own terms: that is, by prayer. He told me that the principal prayer that he used was not some long or complex formula, but simply, "Lord, please, send me a sign." He reported that, almost immediately, not one but a deluge of signs arrived. And they continued to arrive unabated for a long time. As to just what the signs consisted in and what happened next, well, some things must remain private. The reader may deduce the rest from the fact of his conversion. ... — Eric McLuhan, introduction"

The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists.

The past went a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.