A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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We need new perceptions to cope. Our technologies are generations ahead of our thinking. If you even begin to think about these new technologies you appear as a poet because you are dealing with the present as the future. That is my technique.
“The Hot and Cool Interview with Gerald Stearn in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer For The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium With A Rebuttal by McLuhan, 1967, p 292, reprinted in Marshall McLuhan Essays Media Research : Technology Art Communication, (1997), p 78
Year: 1967
Chapters:
McLuhan on McLuhan | Rear View Mirror
As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.
“Magic that changes mood”, in The Mechanical Bride (1951), p 87
Year: 1951
Chapter:
Living Unity
And the complex shuttling of eye, ear and speech factors once engaged in this ballet necessarily reshape the entire communal life, both inner and outer, creating not only the "stream of consciousness" rediscovered by contemporary art, but ensuring multiple impediments to the activities of perception and recall.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 119 reprinted in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 128
Year: 1953
Our entire mode of thought is based on equilibrium: "Things will return to normal," we think. But equilibrium is a principle inherited from Newton. No balance is possible at the speed of light, in economics, physics, in the Church, or wherever…
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 46
Year: 1977
Things will not restabilize. At the speed of light, in a culture that changes from day to day, when we can live a century in ten years, when every day of our lives we can pass through at least a hundred years of historical development, then we have to adapt our psychic and physical lives so that they change at the same rate.
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, 1999 pp 45-46
Year: 1977
By default rather than design, most futurists assume that “human nature” will hold firm. They ignore the fact that technological change has always struck human life right at the heart, changing people just as it changes things.
“The Future of Sex” (1967), typescript p 2
Year: 1967
As gimmick, the machine is useful. As object, as companion, as environment-shaper, it is magical. Marx was right to that extent. He saw that the machine would necessarily transform human feeling and sensibility. It would change habits of association and work. It would re-structure one's idea of the world and of oneself. It was the revolution.
“Poetry and Society”, in Poetry Magazine, Vol. 84, No. 2, May (1954), p 95
Year: 1954
In fact, it is only by careful study of the history of changing techniques of representation in the arts that it is possible to grasp the inner dynamics of social change. The mind of the artist is always the point of maximal sensitivity and resourcefulness in expressing altered realities in the common culture.
“A Historical Approach to the Media” , in Teachers College Record, Vol 57, No. 2 , November (1955), p 109
Year: 1955
A few Europeans like LeCorbusier and Giedion have undertaken to verbalize our technology for us. A few of our artists such as Poe, Henry James, Pound, and Eliot have in reverse order undertaken to technologize the traditional verbal world of the European.
“Space, Time and Poetry”, in Explorations 4, (1955), p 60
Year: 1955
Nobody yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent not to the present.
“Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed the Breath”, in Shenandoah The Washington And Lee University Review, Vol.VII, No. 1, Autumn (1955), p 51, reprinted in Explorations 4, (1955), p 33, Explorations in Communication: an Anthology (1960), p 208, Also appears in alternative format as part of Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations, (1967), Essential McLuhan (1995), p 211
Year: 1955
Throughout history men have seemingly had to endure their technology as a fact as unmistakeable as the color of their skins or their physiological makeup. Today, for the first time, it has become possible to investigate the inner causes of technological innovation and also to predict and control the consequences of such innovation.
“The Public and Private Sectors in the Electric Age.” Paper delivered to The National Conference on Canadian Goals, Fredericton, September 9-12; released September 9, 1964; Typescript, p 9
Year: 1964
The plain fact is that the only way to keep up with enemies or rivals is to be ahead of them – by sheer design.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 156
Year: 1972
Chapters:
Change | Management
Actually, the very absence of cluttering example and traditions in the arts is the main Canadian opportunity. The only possible strategy for the Canadian writer, poet, artist (as it was for Joyce, Pound, and Eliot when they found themselves in cultural backwaters) is to conquer the old traditions through the most revolutionary artistic techniques suggested by the current modes of science and technology. This is the really great advantage enjoyed by any provincial in a time of rapid change. He can not come to the new through the old, but must discover and master the old through what is most recent. By the very nature of his situation, he is familiar with the new and somewhat at a loss in the presence of the traditional. This was the advantage of the Elizabethans confronted by the high art of Italy and France. It was the advantage of Walter Scott and Tolstoy and Faulkner bringing the newest art techniques to unexploited provincial subject matter. For the men in the center of change have less opportunity for appraisal and invention than those on the periphery.
“Defrosting Canadian Culture”, in American Mercury, Vol. 74, No. 339, (1952), p 95
Year: 1952
Chapter:
Canada
In his Company Manners Louis Kronenberger describes how 'one very real social phenomenon of our time is that "creative" people constitute America's newest nouveaux riches. Spectorsky in his Exurbanites refers to them as the symbol-manipulators, meaning those who have mastered the grammar and rhetoric of the new media.
“The Old New Rich and the New New Rich”, in Explorations 8, October (1957); unnumbered page “section 23”, Issue later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967),no pagination in original or reprint.
Year: 1957
That is why in the electronic age we are threatened by new fast-moving and flexible media – while we sit in a Maginot Line convinced of the importance of our position.
“Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media”, (1959), speech reprinted in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, (2003) , p 3
Year: 1959
There is no time to adjust. We simply have to know, and understand, exactly what is happening; and indeed, as educators we can avail ourselves of the artists to help us to become contemporaries of ourselves. Rather we must all become creative artists in order to cope with even the banalities of daily life.
“New Media and the New Education” (1960), p 190
Year: 1960
“Determinism is the result of the behaviour of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them. Recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technological change makes it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation.
Letter to the Editor of Life, March 1,1966 in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 334
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Mastering Technology
A ship that is moving at the same speed as the current has no steerageway. What is ordinarily called planning is, in effect, acceleration.
“Letter to Claude Bissell, May 6, 1960”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 273
Year: 1960
This may be why the conservative has an advantage in such an age of speedy change and is frequently more radical in his suggestions and insights than the progressive who is trying to adjust. The practical progressive trying to make realistic adjustments to change exhausts himself and has no energy to contemplate the overall.
Letter to Claude Bissell, March 8, 1960 in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 65
Year: 1960
Today, when ordinary consciousness is exposed to the patternmaking of several media at once, we are becoming more attentive to the unique properties of each of the media.
“Myth and Mass Media” (1960), in Media Research (1997), p 12
Year: 1960
And I think it is this multiplicity of media that is now enabling man to free himself from media for the first time in history. He has been the victim, the servo-mechanism of his technologies, his media from the beginning of time, but now because of the sheer multiplicity of them he is beginning to awaken. Because he can't live with them all.
“Prospect”, in Canadian Art Magazine, d 19, September-October 1962, p 365
Year: 1962
The real revolution is in this later and prolonged phase of “adjustment” of all personal and social life to the new model of perception set up by the new technology.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, (1962), p 27
Year: 1962
Chapters:
Technology | Tools We Shape, Reshape Us
Is it not possible to emancipate ourselves from the subliminal operation of our own technologies? Is not the essence of education civil defence against media fall-out? Since the effort has never been made in any culture, the answer may seem to lie in doubt.
The Gutenberg Galaxy : The Making of Typographic Man (1962), p 246
Year: 1962
The psychiatrist employs the couch, since it removes the temptation to express private points of view and obviates the need to rationalize events.
Understanding Media , MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 5
Year: 1964
In the merely personal and private sphere we are often reminded of how changes of tone and attitude are demanded of different times and seasons in order to keep situations in hand.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 28
Year: 1964
An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), pp 57-58
Year: 1964
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.
Understanding Media 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 68
Year: 1964
If we persist in a conventional approach to these developments our traditional culture will be swept aside as scholasticism was in the sixteenth century. Had the Schoolmen with their complex oral culture understood the Gutenberg technology, they could have created a new synthesis of written and oral education, instead of bowing out of the picture and allowing the merely visual page to take over the educational enterprise. The oral Schoolmen did not meet the new visual challenge of print, and the resulting expansion or explosion of Gutenberg technology was in many respects an impoverishment of the culture, as historians like Mumford are now beginning to explain.
Understanding Media , MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 71
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Advice | Technology
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.
Understanding Media, MIT/Routledge edition, (1964), p 199
Year: 1964
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
TV will become an art form just as movie has done since TV. But in order to have autonomy we must push the unconscious and environmental parameters right up into consciousness.
“Letter to Harry J. Skornia, October 3, 1964 in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 311
Year: 1964
We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university.
“Notes on Burroughs" (1964), in Essays Media Research (1997), p 90
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Bomb
We're always living away ahead of our thinking.
“Televised Interview by George Garlock and Paul Soles” (1965), Transcript: 8:00
Year: 1965
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
The word “serenity” isn’t even applicable in an age like ours.
“Oracle of the Electronic Age,” Jane Howard, in Life Magazine, February 25, 1966, p 99
Year: 1966
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
Formerly the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today the reverse is the problem. Today we have to adjust, not invent… We have to discover what sort of psychic and social patterns are consistent with our new technologies.
Interview with Thomas P. McDonnell, "Marshall McLuhan – The Man Who Infuriates the Critics." U.S. Catholic, Vol. 31, No. 11, (1966) ,pp. 27-32.
Year: 1966
To understand the change from the world of pictures to the world of icons is to understand why our present world has moved from gradualness and continuity to a world in which everything is abrupt interface.
“Great Change-overs for you”, in Vogue, Vol. 148, No. 1, July 1st (1966), p 62
Year: 1966
Harnessing the Tennessee, Missouri or Mississippi is kid stuff compared to curbing the movie, press, or television to human ends. The wild broncos of technological culture have yet to find their busters or masters. They have only found their P.T. Barnums.
“Media Log” (1954),Explorations 4 (February 1955), p 54
Year: 1954
Chapters:
He’s Doubtful | Mastering Technology
We are individually overwhelmed by corporate consciousness and by the inclusive experience of mankind both past and present. It would be a comic irony if men proved unable to cope with abundance and riches in both the economic and psychic order. It is not likely to happen.
“Cybernation and Culture”, 1966, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 103
Year: 1966
Chapters:
Corporate Consciousness | Individual
Our four-century preoccupation with print has fixed our attention on so limited an aspect of the media that we find it very hard to release our attention to the whole range of media influence.
“The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion”, Perspecta, Vol.11, (1967),
Year: 1967
What the writer of this brief does not know is that assumptions can also come within the range of prediction and control just as soon as it is recognized that the new media of communication in any age, as they penetrate and transform the older media, are the source of new assumptions and consequently the causes of change in our objectives.
“Explorations In The New World “, in McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer for The Understanding Of & A Critical Symposium with a Rebuttal By McLuhan ,(1967), p 152
Year: 1967
You have to work at innocence. I don’t think innocence is a thing that drops on your head like snow. No, I think innocence is as hard to achieve as great sophistication. It’s being capable of excluding from one’s deepest realizations the idiocy of scorekeeping, of feeling you must be with the latest phrase, or with the hippest features.
“Love,” in Saturday Night, Vol. 82 ,No. 2, February, (1967), p 33
Year: 1967
In the electronic age… you cannot have jobs; you can only have a role.
“Open-Mind Surgery, Fordham lecture”, Sept. 18, (1967), in Understanding Me (2003), p 155
Year: 1967
Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view—the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 10
Year: 1967
How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 12
Year: 1967
The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 16
Year: 1967
We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 63
Year: 1967
The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view. We speak, for instance, of “gaining perspective.” This psychological process derives unconsciously from print technology.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 68
Year: 1967
Application of this knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostat controlling room temperature. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being. We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle these thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.
The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p 68
Year: 1967
When we live in a museum without walls, or have music as a structural part of our sensory environment, new strategies of attention and perception have to be created.
Through The Vanishing Point with Harley Parker,(1968), p 243
Year: 1968
To create an antienvironment for such electric technology would seem to require a technological extension of both private and corporate consciousness. The awareness and opposition of the individual are in these circumstances as irrelevant as they are futile.
Through The Vanishing Point with Harley Parker, (1968), p 244
Year: 1968
I think we would do ourselves a considerable kindness if we closed down TV operations for a few years… It is destroying our entire political, educational, social, institutional life. TV will dissolve the entire fabric of society in a short time.
“Marshalling McLuhan”, in The Canadian Banker, Vol 66, No 2, March-April, (1969), p 4
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Advice
The effects of new media on our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of our world.
“Preface”, in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 32
Year: 1969
That the entire planet should become show business on a twenty-four-hour basis is not only inevitable now, but it creates "challenges" for all levels of the establishment on a scale that will gradually obliterate consciousness.
“A Peculiar War to Fight”, Letter to R.J. Leuver (1969), in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 91
Year: 1969
Chapters:
He’s Doubtful | Warnings
In the global village of continuous learning and of total participation in the human dialogue, the problem of settlement is to extend consciousness itself and to maximize the opportunities of learning.
Counterblast, (1969), p 41
Year: 1969
To transform ourselves into probes and to abandon the traditional visual obsession with fixed point of view are the necessary prelude to extending not just our nerves but the symmetrical ratios of consciousness into the environment.
Counterblast, (1969), p 139
Year: 1969
The ivory tower becomes the control tower of human navigation.
Counterblast, (1969), p 143
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Education
...the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 56, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 238
Year: 1969
All our alienation and atomization are reflected in the crumbling of such time-honored social values as the right of privacy and the sanctity of the individual.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 62, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 249
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Individual
…the extensions of man’s consciousness induced by the electric media…[hold] the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ – Yeats’ rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
“Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media”. By Eric Norden. Playboy Magazine, March (1969), p 158, reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 268-269
Year: 1969
Why did you leave Karl Marx out of your inventory of hot gospellers? Are you trying to duck the pattern of finding categories for all? Do you think of him as an untalented scientist or also as a “talented quack” like me?
Letter to the Editor, New Society, March 10, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 402
Year: 1970
Theodore Lipps pointed out long ago that the single clang of a bell includes all possible symphonies and music. It is this inclusiveness and simultaneity of experience that reunifies the consciousness of our time.
“The Man Who Came To Listen” (1970), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 170
Year: 1970
Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 13
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Sleepwalkers
Machiavelli saw the new private morality created by the new specialist technology of print as creating new political goals.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 46
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Print | Technology
Man's right to his own ignorance might be said to be his principal means of private identity.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 63
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Ignorance
On the frontier, everyone is a nobody and must prove himself each day. He has no "place" in the world. Thus the Western is a paradigm of the condition of man in a rapidly changing or a growing society.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 90
Year: 1970
…biogeneticists say today that a growing organism, at every point in its growth, has to know what the whole organism is doing in order to develop. The consequences of the image are the images of the consequences.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 150
Year: 1970
Many people simply resort instantly to the occult, to ESP and every form of hidden awareness, in answer to this new surround of electric consciousness.
“Electric Consciousness and the Church” (1970), in The Man and His Message (1989), p 168
Year: 1970
In the age of the organ transplant the definition of “death” has become problematic.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 162
Year: 1970
Chapter:
McLuhanisms & Zingers
The old mythology is disintegrating; to survive is to remythologize. The radical common denominator is that we accept change as a normal condition. Accelerando, ergo sum.
“Myth”, in Popular Culture Mosaic (1972), p 25
Year: 1972
The new corporate identity of electronic man has arrived so suddenly that it still coexists with private and individual identity.
“Mr. Nixon and the Dropout Strategy”, in The New York Times, July 29, (1973), p E13
Year: 1973
At electric speeds, new direct perception of existence bypasses old die-hard concepts of Nature. We can now anticipate the effects of both services and disservices—before allowing the causes to develop. We no longer merely choose options, we make them. We can invent the remedies for both fortune and misfortune.
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 18 , reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 30
Year: 1973
I find what’s going on altogether too much and utterly beyond ordinary human comprehension. It is too much. I would say that if we were realistic, we would be very well advised to turn off all electric circuits in the world for a few years. Cancel them, kill them, just stop them.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 27
Year: 1973
And so, at the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 27
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Satirist
The First World has as much trouble relating to the Fourth World of electronics as the Third World has in obtaining benefits from the First World of industrial hardware. On the other hand, the Third World has no trouble in relating to the acoustic and electronic Fourth World.
“Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau March 26, (1974)”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 493
Year: 1974
The task horrifies us. We are not designed to change at such a pace. Alvin Toffler called it "Future Shock": "We are going too fast, we cannot adapt." At this speed, we cannot adapt to anything. Our entire mode of thought is based on equilibrium: "Things will return to normal," we think. But equilibrium is a principle inherited from Newton. No balance is possible at the speed of light, in economics, physics, in the Church, or wherever…
“Keys to the Electronic Revolution: First Conversation with Pierre Babin” (1977), in The Medium and the Light, (1999), p 46
Year: 1977
We can musically harmonize our lives to a fantastic degree today. And we are heading that way.
“The Medium Brings His Message to the Governor”, in Los Angeles Times, March 12, (1978), p F1
Year: 1978
Chapter:
Harmony
The surfacing of man’s subconscious came with the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and then TV and other electric media. It is impossible to sublimate or keep anything hidden at that speed. So we have to invent a new concept of civilization in order to live at the speed of light.
Man and Media,” lecture delivered at York University, Toronto, (1979), in Understanding Me (2003), p 296
Year: 1979
When information moves at electric speed, the world of trends and rumors becomes the "real world.”
“Living at the Speed of Light (1979)”, published in part in Macleans magazine, January 7, (1980), this line found only in the typescript, on p10
Year: 1979
Chapters:
Goodbye Linearity | Gossip and Rumors
In a period of rapid change you have to wake up. We are all sleepwalkers, but when you're changing from one element to the other, you must be completely awake.
Quoted by B.W. Powe, “McLuhan: the Put-On,” in A Climate Changed (1984), p 22
Year: 1984
Chapter:
Sleepwalkers
The bigger the technology, the bigger the upset, and the bigger the threat to one's image. The image can be private or corporate.
“Letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, July 30, (1975)”, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 513
Year: 1975
The Aldous Huxleys and all that crowd are not twentieth-century minds. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution – in fact, in 1810 – the only reaction that the English could muster to that tremendous change was panic about scarcity. Are we not behaving very much in the same way concerning jobs in automation?”
Letter to John Snyder Jr., August 14, 1963, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, (1987), p 292
Year: 1963
As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 239
Year: 1988
There is no inevitability, however, where there is a willingness to pay attention.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 12
Year: 1989
The future holds for us a corporate man who will accept the goldfish bowl as a natural habitat—having recognized that electronic espionage has already become an art form.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 114
Year: 1989
… specialism will yield to corporate role-playing on a mass scale.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, (1989), p 120
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Playfulness
We are living in a situation which has been called "future shock." Future shock, in fact, is culture lag, that is, the failure to notice what is happening in the present.
“The End of the Work Ethic”, in Understanding Me (2003), p 205
Year: 2003
Chapter:
Rear View Mirror
There are no connections in resonant [acoustic] space. There are only interfaces and metamorphoses.
The Papal Interval 1970, 1969, p 3 (unpublished)
Year: 1970
My own approach, following Harold Innis, is a transformation theory, thus homeostasis of the perceptual factors in a rapidly changing environment requires much redistribution of emphasis among the senses. For example, a blind or deaf person compensates for the loss of one sense by a heightening of activity in the others. It seems to me that this also occurs in whole populations, when new technologies create new sensory environments.
Quoted in “McLuhan Delivers His Message,” by Bella Strumbo, Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1972; later quoted in W. Terrence Gordon’s Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (1997), p 150
Year: 1972
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proven more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 97
Year: 1988
In every situation, metamorphosis depends on the frozen arrest of an action. The diehard, paradoxically, can be read as an epitath on his own tombstone.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
Chapter:
Transform
Perhaps it is this last factor [the assumption by artists and scientists that the public should be addressed but not changed] that has excluded the study of communication as transformation from our schools and universities.
“English Literature as Control Tower in Communication Study,” English Quarterly (University of Waterloo), Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring, 1974, p 5
Year: 1974
Chapter:
Transform