Quote

First we build the tools, then they build us.

Marshall McLuhan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marshall McLuhan
Age: 69 †
Born: 1911
Born: July 21
Died: 1980
Died: December 31
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Edmonton
Alberta
Herbert Marshall McLuhan
Marshall MacLuhan
Marshall Mac Luhan
Tools
Build
Firsts
First

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

Image
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the Tower of Babel by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The story begins only when the book closes.
Marshall McLuhan