Marshall mcluhan quotes

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

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

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.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

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.

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

Our technology forces us to live mythically

Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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

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

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

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

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

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.

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

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

All advertising advertises advertising.

Art is anything you can get away with.

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

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.

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

Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.

The future of work consists of learning a living.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

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

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

I do not explain, I explore.

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

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

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

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

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

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

Affluence creates poverty.

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

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.

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

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

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

There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

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

Jokes are grievances.

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.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

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

The story begins only when the book closes.

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.

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.

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

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.

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

The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.

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.

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us

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

First we build the tools, then they build us.

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

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

The mother tongue is propaganda.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's problems.

Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed.

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.

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

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.

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

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

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

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

The 'content' of any medium is always another medium.

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

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.

Fish did not discover water.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.

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

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.

The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself".

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

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

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

If it works, it's obsolete.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

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 ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

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

I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

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.

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

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

Our permanent address is tommorrow.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

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

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.

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.

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

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

Only the vanquished remember history.

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.

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

The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

Education is civil defence against media fallout.