Quotes from Marshall McLuhan

Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.

The Newtonian God—the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.

Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on 'substance'. The dramatic and rapid changes of 'substance' elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view - the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.

The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists.

The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.

For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes.

Thus, as passivity becomes extreme in the bulk of society, a sizeable segment of citizens detaches itself from the dream-locked majority. As vulgarity and stupidity thicken, more and more people awaken to the intolerability of their condition. Much can be done to foster this state of awareness, even though little can be done directly to change the policies of those in control today of the media of communication.

Homer's Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.

That outering or uttering of sense which is language and speech is a tool which "made it possible for man to accumulate experience and knowledge in a form that made easy transmission and maximum use possible.

Advertising is corporate form of art and the goal is to make an effect. Every artist- any painter, any poet or musician sets out to create an effect, he sets a trap to catch somebody`s attention. That is the nature of art.

The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed.

Arquímedes dijo una vez: <> Hoy en día, habría señalado nuestros medios de comunicación electrónicos y habría dicho: <>. Pero una vez que hemos entregado nuestros sentidos y nuestros sistemas nerviosos a las manipulaciones de quienes tratan de sacar provecho aniquilando nuestros ojos, oídos, nervios y cerebro, el resultado será que ya no tendremos derechos.

Ours is a brand new world of allatonceness. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village … a simultaneous happening.

An expert is a man who doesn't make the slightest error on the road to the Grand Illusion.

Either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality.

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer.

In modern thought, (if not in fact) Nothing is that doesn't act, So that is reckoned wisdom which Describes the scratch but not the itch.

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

When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition.

Mediumul este mesajul.

El hombre que almacena alimentos reaparece incongruentemente como el hombre que almacena información.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.