Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Quotes about:

• All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Perception, Arbitrary

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  51 Copy quote

• We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Tools, Shapes

  "New technology is fuelling the growth of gaming with social purpose" by David Hawksworth, Christian Johnsen, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2014.

  57 Copy quote
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  World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Military, War, Division

  Marshall McLuhan (2015). “Culture Is Our Business”, p.66, Wipf and Stock Publishers

  128 Copy quote

• All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Psychics, Political

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

  114 Copy quote

• 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. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Eye, Rights, Giving

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

  29 Copy quote

• People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mistake, People, Soul

  73 Copy quote

• Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Alternatives, Patterns, Information

  Marshall McLuhan (1969). “Counter blast [by] Marshall McLuhan”

  25 Copy quote

• There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mean, Thinking, People

  "The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool" by Gary Wolf, www.wired.com. January 01, 1996.

  36 Copy quote

• Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Communication, Men, Media

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore (1967). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Gingko Pr Inc

  36 Copy quote

• Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Evil, Secret, Needs

  34 Copy quote

• There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Motivational, Nature, Animal

  "Paradigms Lost: Learning from Environmental Mistakes, Mishaps and Misdeeds" by Daniel A. Vallero, (p. 367), 2005.

  123 Copy quote

• We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Technology, Robots, Involved

  Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan (2017). “The Lost Tetrads of Marshall McLuhan”, p.99, OR Books

  20 Copy quote

• Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Success, Powerful, Political

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  61 Copy quote

• Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Done, Computer, Monopoly

  Marshall McLuhan, Barrington Nevitt (1972). “Take today; the executive as dropout”, [Don Mills

  54 Copy quote

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

  Marshall McLuhan

  Patterns, Information, Recognition

  11 Copy quote

• The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Real, Media, News

  33 Copy quote

• The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Science, Answers, Problem

  9 Copy quote

• The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mirrors, Views, Old Things

  21 Copy quote

• It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Confused, Worship, Sincerity

  35 Copy quote

• An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Real, Men, Inspire

  Marshall McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, William Toye (1987). “Letters of Marshall McLuhan”, Oxford University Press, USA

  12 Copy quote

• The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Technology, Impact, Messages

  29 Copy quote

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

  Marshall McLuhan

  Science, Technology, Data

  Marshall McLuhan, Wilfred Watson (1970). “From cliché to archetype”, Viking Adult

  45 Copy quote

• Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Identity

  "Violence in the media". Canadian Forum, Volume 56, (p. 9), 1976.

  24 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mean, Hands, Games

  17 Copy quote

• Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Trying, Asks

  57 Copy quote

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