Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Marshall McLuhan - Page 5

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.

The winner is one who knows when to drop out in order to get in touch.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world.

The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness [all-at-once-ness]. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening. ... The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.

The real news is bad news.

Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

The medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the search and form of human associations and action.

The logos of creation, 'And God Said ...' formed the basis of Christian interpretation of the 'Book of Nature.

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.

The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.

The criminal, like the artist, is a social explorer.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.

We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions.

Obsolescence is the moment of superabundance.

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.

There is a real, living unity in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.

The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song.

The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

The past went that-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. We march backwards into the future.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.

Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

Primitivism has become the vulgar cliché of much modern art and speculation.

The media have substituted themselves for the older world.

The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form.

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.

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.

Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

I'm not sure who discovered water, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a fish.

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.