Quote

Poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

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
Mind
Poetry
Exposure
State
Mentality
Action
Vital
Art
Tension
Doe
Arts
Incorrigibly
America
Remain
Dialectical
States
Mere
Tensions
Nothing
Exist
Inaccessible

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

Image
Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation, violence is the natural recourse.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
To say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The media have substituted themselves for the older world.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
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
Art is anything you can get away with.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Photography turns people into things and their image into a mass consumer product.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.
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
As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
For those for whom the sex act has come to seem mechanical and merely the meeting and manipulation of body parts, there often remains a hunger which can be called metaphysical but which is not recognized as such, and which seeks satisfaction in physical danger, or sometimes in torture, suicide, or murder.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.
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
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 greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.
Marshall McLuhan