# Marshall McLuhan

- Quotes: 54
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan

## Books

- [The Medium is the Massage](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage.md) — 13 quotes
- [Understanding Media](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/understanding-media.md) — 41 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. (p. 93)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/the-professional-tends.md)

> There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. [A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead]

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/there-is-absolutely.md)

> Art is whatever you can get away with.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/art-is-whatever.md)

> Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. (p. 48)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/until-writing-was.md)

> We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/we-look-at-the.md)

> Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/youth-instinctively-understand.md)

> Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. 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. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar. (p.46)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/understanding-media/physiologically-man-in-the.md)

> Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/electric-circuitry-profoundly.md)

> All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. (p. 178-179)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/understanding-media/all-meaning-alters.md)

> In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin. (p. 47)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/understanding-media/in-the-electric-age.md)

> Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. (p. 261)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/understanding-media/radio-affects-most.md)

> All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical. (p. 26)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/marshall-mcluhan/the-medium-is-the-massage/all-media-work.md)