Quote

First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape 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
First
Thereafter
Shape
Tools
Shapes
Firsts

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

Image
People don't actually read newspapers - they get into them every morning like a hot bath.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
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.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.
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
There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.
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
Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it
Marshall McLuhan
Image
While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.
Marshall McLuhan