Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

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

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

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

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

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

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

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

Life. Consider the alternative.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

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

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.

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.

The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

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

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

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]

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.

All media work us over completely.

There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for content are illusioned.