Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan

Canadian Philosopher of Communication Theory, Educator, Author and Media Expert

"It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art."

"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."

"It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness."

"I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened."

"It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action."

"It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV."

"It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter."

"Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom."

"Jobs are finished; role-playing has taken over; the job is a passe entity. The job belonged to the specialist. The kids know that they no longer live in a specialist world; you cannot have a goal today. You cannot say, "I'm going to start here and I'm going to work for the next three years and I'm going to go all that distance." Every kid knows that within three years, everything will have changed including himself and the goal."

"King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs."

"Jokes are grievances."

"Language alone includes all the senses in interplay at all times."

"Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression."

"Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement."

"Language is a sense, like touch."

"Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically."

"Left hemisphere industrialism has blinded the Chinese to the effects of our alphabet: pattern recognition is in the right hemisphere."

"Language is a form of organized stutter. I?m flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip."

"Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness."

"Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African."

"Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society."

"Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual."

"Literate man, civilized man, tends to restrict and to separate functions, whereas tribal man has freely extended the form of his body to include the universe."

"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation."

"Logos is the formal cause of the cosmos and all things, responsible for their nature and configuration."

"Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering."

"Logic is figure without a ground."

"Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."

"Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure."

"Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about."

"Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse ? a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story."

"Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance."

"Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment."

"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think."

"Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds."

"Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity."

"Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual."

"Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception... When these ratios change, men change."

"Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech."

"Money is a corporate image depending on society for its institutional status."

"Money is a poor man's credit card."

"Money is just the poor man's credit card."

"My method is vertical rather than horizontal so the scenery does not change but the texture does."

"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."

"Mysticism is just tomorrow?s science dreamed today."

"Native societies did not think of themselves as being in the world as occupants but considered that their rituals created the world and keep it operational."

"Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity."

"New art is sensory violence on the frontiers of experience."

"New media are new languages, their grammar and syntax yet unknown."

"New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media."