Marshall McLuhan Quotes - Page 4

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself".

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

Affluence creates poverty.

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

If it works, it's obsolete.

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening. Because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I’m resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication...is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

The most human thing about us is our technology.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

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

Education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression.