McLuhan:

 

"All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical"
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 26

 

"the 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"
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 31-40

 

"The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life.
It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.
Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to "the others. And they're changing dramatically."
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan

 

"The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries."
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan

 

"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion..."
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan

 

"You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?"
The New Yorker Magazine 1966 - The Medium is the Massage

 

"The line, the continuum
-this sentence is a great example-
became the organizing principle of life. 'As we begin, so shall we go.' 'Rationality' and logic came to depend the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts."
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 45

 

"By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds"
Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan p 15

 

"In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground."
Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan p 99

 

"All words, in every language, are metaphors."
Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan p 120

 

"At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential."
Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan p 109

 

"The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation."
Laws of Media, Marshall McLuhan p 98

 

"The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends."

"... Their power to see environments as they really are."
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 88

 

"Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental.
Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose"
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 93

 

"We have be-come irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other."
The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 24

 

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with".
Marshall McLuhan put it on The Best of Ideas on CBC Radio in 1967

 

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature." 1969
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 272.

 

"The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality." 1978
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 272.

 

"Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression." 1957
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 272.

 

"New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature." 1960
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 272. Hm... Yes, a book, a performance through printed words cannot exist on static stone tablets...

 

"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame."1955
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 273.

 

"The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way." 1995
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 273.

 

"Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both." 1964
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 274.

 

"Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves." 1955
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 273. And the Internet, Web - newsgroups...

 

"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally." 1967
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 275.

 

"Arists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another." 1964
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 278.

 

"A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." 1964
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 278.

 

"The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus." 1964
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 279.

 

"Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton." 1974
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 283.

 

"As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself"." 1957
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 283.

 

"In large measure, writing is the spatialization of thought." 1954
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 285.

 

"In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation." 1954
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 285.

 

"The photograoh reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar." 1964
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 287.

 

"The rythms of typing favour short, concise sentences, sentences with oral form." 1974
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 289.

 

" Typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it." 1974
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 289.

 

"The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure." 1964
Edited by Eric McLuhan & Frank Zingrone "Essential McLuhan" Routledge 1997 ISBN 0-415-16245-9 page 290.