01UndatedWith 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.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
03UndatedA point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
04UndatedOur Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
05UndatedAmerican youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
07UndatedI 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.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
11UndatedWe become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
12UndatedThe 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.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
13UndatedStudents 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.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
14UndatedIn 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 / quote ↗
17UndatedRationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or proportion in their sense lives but are wired for fixed wave lengths, as it were, having infallibility in their own area of experience. Consciousness, complex and subtle, can be impaired or ended by a mere stepping-up or dimming-down of any one sense intensity, which is the procedure in hypnosis. And the intensification of one sense by a new medium can hypnotize an entire community.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
18UndatedUntil 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, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
19UndatedThe wheel… is an extension of the foot. The book… is an extension of the eye…Clothing, an extension of the skin…Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
24UndatedTo see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.Marshall McLuhan / quote ↗
