Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

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

World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.

Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

Art is the sole means of grace in our fallen state.

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

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

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture.

In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.

Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment—of what's really going on—affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools—with yesterday's concepts.

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren't going somewhere, you're already there. On the telephone you're not going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you're there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we're already there. McLuhan CD-ROM

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental.

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

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

The stars are so big, The Earth is so small, Stay as you are.

The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities. McLuhan CD-ROM

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.

The past went a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.

Our time is a time to cross barriers, for erasing old categories — for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result

In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of information-gathering. Today information-gathering resumes the inclusive concept of "culture" exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and "workless" world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society.

Jack Paar mentioned that he once had said to a young friend, "Why do you kids use 'cool' to mean 'hot'?" The friend replied, "Because you folks used up the word 'hot' before we came along.