Marshall McLuhan Quotes

"New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual o"

"A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new."

"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."

"One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor."

"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium / that is, of any extension of ourselves / result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."

"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"

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools."

"If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch."

"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think."

"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."

"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."

"Acoustic space has the basic character of a sphere whose focus or centre is simultaneously everywhere and whose margin is nowhere..."

"In the name of progress, our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old."

"The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way."

"The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village."

"Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events."

"Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness."

"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."

"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."