Marshall McLuhan quotes - page 21

The past went that-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. We march backwards into the future. (Marshall McLuhan)
A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The new media are not ways of relating to us the 'real' world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
There is no more great men; there is only great committees. (Marshall McLuhan)
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. (Marshall McLuhan)
Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
North Americans have a peculiar bias. They go outside to be alone and they go home to be social. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by disc. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The modern nose, like the modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity which makes our human contacts painful and revolting. View quote
Marshall McLuhan