Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 2

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.

What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.

Technology is that which separates us from our environment.

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.

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.

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

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

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

Education is civil defence against media fallout.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.