Marshall McLuhan

Sociologist

1911-07-21

Quotes by Marshall McLuhan

• Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on 'substance'. The dramatic and rapid changes of 'substance' elude these accusers. 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.

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• The ear favours no particular —point of view."We are enveloped by sound.It forms a seamless web around us.We say, "Music shall fill the air.— We never say, "Music shall fill a particular segment of the air."We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from —above,— from —below,— from in —front— of us, from —behind— us, from our —right,— from our —left."We can"t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

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• We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

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• Only the vanquished remember history.

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• Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

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• I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening. Because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I'm resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.

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• Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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• Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools!

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• A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding.

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• Art is whatever you can get away with.

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• With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

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• I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening. Because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certainly something I'm resolutely against. And it seems to me the best way to oppose it is to understand it. And then you know where to turn off the buttons.

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• Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on 'substance'. The dramatic and rapid changes of 'substance' elude these accusers. 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.

  Read quote

• Only the vanquished remember history.

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• Art is whatever you can get away with.

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• Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

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• The ear favours no particular —point of view."We are enveloped by sound.It forms a seamless web around us.We say, "Music shall fill the air.— We never say, "Music shall fill a particular segment of the air."We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from —above,— from —below,— from in —front— of us, from —behind— us, from our —right,— from our —left."We can"t shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.

  Read quote

• A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding.

  Read quote

• We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

  Read quote

• Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools!

  Read quote