Marshall McLuhan

“All words, in every language, are metaphors.”

“There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for "content" are illusioned.”

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”

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

“if it works it's obsolete”

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

“Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”

“A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.”

“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.”

“Theirs is the customary human reaction when confronted with innovation: to flounder about attempting to adapt old responses to new situations or to simply condemn or ignore the harbingers of change--a practice refined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.”

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”

“Art is anything you can get away with.”

“All media work us over completely.”

“Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about.”

“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.”

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

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“Diaper spelled backwards is repaid , think about it.”

“Our permanent address is tommorrow.”

“The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be. ”

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

“The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.”

“Our technology forces us to live mythically”

“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”

“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.”

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]”

“Allmediaareextensionsofsomehumanfaculty-psychicorphysical.”

“Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”

“The medium is the message.”

“Playboy: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?McLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.”

“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.”

“In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

“With the arrival of electric technology, man has 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 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. ”

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.”

“I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.”

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!”