Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

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

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

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

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.

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

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

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.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

Nowadays there is no conversation at all. Teachers distrust talk as much as business men.

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.

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

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

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

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.

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

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

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.