Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

Our permanent address is tommorrow.

Someone asked me if I really believed there was life after death. I replied: Do you really believe there is any life before death?

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.

they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing;

if it works it's obsolete

The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.

Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind.

All through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime

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

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.

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.

Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.

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

The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function. McLuhan CD-ROM

The artist is a person who is expert in the training of perception.

In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

The child was an invention of the seventeenth century; he did not exist in, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, up until that time, been merged in the adult world and there was nothing that could be called childhood in our sense. Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up - that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice.

In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

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.

Playboy : Have you ever taken LSD yourself? McLUHAN : No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.

The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.

they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.