04 April 2021

Marshall McLuhan - Collected Quotes

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962)

"The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favoured the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962)

"When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962)

"All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"Environments are invisible. Their ground-rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally." (Marshall McLuhan, American Scholar Vol. 35, 1965)

"The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention." (Marshall McLuhan, Mademoiselle Vol. 64, 1966)

"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." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Best of Ideas", 1967)

"Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects", 1967)

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."(Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." (Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors." (Marshall McLuhan, "Culture Is Our Business", 1970)

"Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly." (Marshall McLuhan, "Take Today: The Executive as Dropout", 1972)

"Every process pushed far enough tends to reverse or flip suddenly. Chiasmus – the reversal to process caused by increasing its speed, scope or size." (Marshall McLuhan, "Take Today: The Executive as Dropout", 1972)

"New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers." (Marshall McLuhan, "Take Today: The Executive as Dropout", 1972)

"Paradox is the technique for seizing the conflicting aspects of any problem. Paradox coalesces or telescopes various facets of a complex process in a single instant." (Marshall McLuhan, "Take Today: The Executive as Dropout", 1972)

"The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie." (Marshall McLuhan, Journalism quarterly Vol. 50, 1973)

"Formal logic and the logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"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." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews" , 2003)

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan", 2011) 

"As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art." (Marshall McLuhan)

"By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth." (Marshall McLuhan)

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always precede causes in the actual developmental order." (Marshall McLuhan)

"The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation." (Marshall McLuhan)

"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result." (Marshall McLuhan)

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