Marshall McLuhan Quotes

To the blind all things are sudden.
— Marshall McLuhan

Touch does not create a connection but an interval.
— Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is itself an enormous establishment of satisfactions. In fact, most people would not know what the meaning of their positions was without advertising. Advertising tells them how they feel about what they have, not what they should have.
— Marshall McLuhan

The paradox is the touch does not unite but separate and so as people become more involved in each other the more distance they feel the need of between themselves.
— Marshall McLuhan

You know, all this genius stuff and so on is rather useless categorizing. There are people who just have to notice what's going around them. Why the hell call them geniuses? They're awake. Most people rather sleep it out. You know, normal people in normal situations tend to black out nearly the whole thing in the interests of comfort. Ordinary perceptions are deliberately deadened to permit life to be bearable.
— Marshall McLuhan

In order to make anything noticeable you have to yank it out of its original context.
— Marshall McLuhan

Why should I interrupt my education by going to school?
— Marshall McLuhan

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
— Marshall McLuhan

This is the main form of achieving identity. Getting beaten up or beating somebody else up. It's what we call the educational system. The educational system is a form of warfare conducted against your nervous system. Trying to shape it and pattern into patterns which we approve of in which you have never heard of.
— Marshall McLuhan

When you're totally involved in any situation you have no point of view. You have to have detachment, you have to be outside the situation to have a point of view.
— Marshall McLuhan

Every medium creates an environment and that is always invisible. You name it, any medium, whatever, creates a new environment which is invisible. And it is this medium, the hidden one, that is the message, in all cases. The message of all technologies is the environment that it creates … It's fascinating simply because the new environments are always unnoticed by the people who live in them and who make them.
— Marshall McLuhan

War as educator is matched by education as warfare. In which you ruthlessly impose on other people a pattern of perception and feeling. Teach them how to behave. Teach them how to be neat and tidy. Teach them how to fit in. This is our own goal in education.
— Marshall McLuhan

Civilized means visual.
— Marshall McLuhan

If you push one sense down the others goes up. That's true for all the senses. So if you lower the lights you hear better.
— Marshall McLuhan

We don't have a clue as to who to blame for anything, really. The act of placing the blame is itself escapism. Value judgments, in these matters, are pure escapism. They serve that function of taking us off the hook, taking the heat off.
— Marshall McLuhan

We are living mythically but we still try to think rationally, in the old nineteenth century pattern. But our lives are actually conducted at mythic speeds and multi-levels of things happening, many levels at once, as in a myth.
— Marshall McLuhan

When you're really committed or involved you can't have a point of view…No tribal group can have a point of view, they're committed. They're totally involved.
— Marshall McLuhan

The body doesn't fit into an environment anymore it makes the environment.
— Marshall McLuhan

Affluence creates poverty.
— Marshall McLuhan

The scientist has great trouble looking forward past his problem because his knowledge gets in the way. It is only the very ignorant person who can get past that problem because he is not fogged over by knowledge. When you’re looking for new answers to new questions, it is knowledge itself that blocks progress. It is knowledge that creates real ignorance, just as wealth creates poverty. Every time a new discovery is made, enormous new areas of ignorance are opened up.
— Marshall McLuhan

It is the environment that changes people, not the technology.
— Marshall McLuhan

Any specialist is going to see to it that his specialty is protected against any invasion from any quarter.
— Marshall McLuhan

The natural tendency is to use any new technology for the old purposes.
— Marshall McLuhan

Presumably people tend to know least about the things they're most imposed upon by. There seems to be a mechanism of protective inihibitions so the people automatically seal off the areas where experience is maximal. They seem to know least about the areas that they are most involved in experientially.
— Marshall McLuhan

The artist, the enema of society, points out things that many people would prefer not to notice.
— Marshall McLuhan

Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment, where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules.
— Marshall McLuhan

If it works, it's obsolete.
— Marshall McLuhan

Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.
— Marshall McLuhan

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
— Marshall McLuhan

You mean my whole fallacy's wrong?
— Marshall McLuhan

Violence is the quest for identity.
— Marshall McLuhan

A point of view means a static fixed position and you can't have a static fixed position in the electric age. It's impossible to have a point of view in the electric age and have any meaning at all. You've got to be everywhere at once whether you like it or not. You have to be participating in everything going on at the same time and that is not a point of view.
— Marshall McLuhan

Children are the messages that we send to the future.
— Marshall McLuhan

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.
— Marshall McLuhan

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
— Marshall McLuhan

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
— Marshall McLuhan

Education is war declared on the young.
— Marshall McLuhan