Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Marshall McLuhan - Page 3

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

I do not explain, I explore.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody.

The story begins only when the book closes.

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They've been asleep for 500 years and they don't like anybody who comes along and stirs them up.

With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.

During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more wit and art go into the making of an ad than into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

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

When people become too intense, too serious, they will have trouble in relating to any sort of social game or norm. Perhaps this is why jokes are so important. On one hand they tell us about where the problems and grievances are, and, at the same time, they provide the means of enduring these grievances by laughing at the problems.

I don't want them to believe me, I just want them to think.

It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it

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

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

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artist? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happem if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

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

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us

Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

If it works, it's obsolete.

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

Our permanent address is tommorrow.

People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.

Electronic man has no physical body.

Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

The school system is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.

The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

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

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.