Quote

Today, the mass audience (the successor to the public) can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.

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
Used
Instead
Packages
Today
Answers
Passive
Public
Yesterday
Creative
Entertainment
Politics
Merely
Successor
Audience
Questions
Successors
Force
Offers
Given
Mass
Participating

More quotes by Marshall McLuhan

Image
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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
First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
People hope that if they scream loudly enough about values then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
One main condition of aristocratic life was present in the South and not in the North--personal responsibility to other human beings for education and material welfare. (A Carnegie or a Ford, like a bureaucracy, molds the lives of millions without taking any responsibility.)
Marshall McLuhan
Image
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
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
The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The huge advantage of Canada is its backwardness.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.
Marshall McLuhan
Image
Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.
Marshall McLuhan