“…the only effective media controls must take the thermostatic form of quantitative rationing. Just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media fallout. Education will become recognized as civil defence against media fallout.” McLuhan

“If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures… All those gestural qualities that the printed page strips from language come back in the dark, and on the radio.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Radio: The Tribal Drum’ 1964

“The new extensions of man and the environment they generate [media] are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts rather than what it does to us and with us. 1969

“Our natural responses to media, and to technology, are irrelevant. We cannot trust our instincts or our natural physical responses to our new things. They will destroy us.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Man and Media’ lecture at York University 1975

“... change itself is the only constant in an electronic world of communication. …a world in which the creative imagination of the artist is now needed by the men who handle the computer.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’ Journal of Communication 1958

“Automation certainly assumes the servomechanism and the computer. …it assumes electricity as store and expediter of information. These traits of store, or ‘memory’ and accelerator are the basic traits of any medium of communication whatever.” Marshall McLuhan 1964

“Today technologies and their consequent environments succeed each other so rapidly that one environment makes us aware of the next. Technologies begin to perform the function of art in making us aware of the psychic and social consequences of technology.” Marshall McLuhan 1966

“Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite.” Marshall McLuhan introduction to the second edition ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.’ 1966

Marshall McLuhan’s advice on what to do about our media problems, in the latest McLuhan Newsletter. https://t.co/rroeGWmgoW

“Ecology was born with Sputnik, for in an electric information environment all events become clamorous and simultaneous… At instant speed the hidden becomes plain to see.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Media Ad-Vice: an introduction.’ 1973

Environments, by reason of their total character, are mostly subliminal in ordinary experience. Indeed, the amount of any situation, private or social, verbal or geographic, that can be raised and held to the conscious level of attention is almost insignificant. McLuhan 1973

“Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance. Marshall McLuhan ‘Media Ad-Vice: and introduction.’ 1973

“Perhaps the most precious possession of man is his abiding awareness of the Analogy of Proper Proportionality, the key to all metaphysical insight, and perhaps the very condition of consciousness itself.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Through the Vanishing Point’ 1969

Near the end of his life, Marshall McLuhan was asked what he considered his greatest achievement. His answer: discovering the four ‘laws of media.’

“The early stages by which information itself became the basic economic commodity of the electric age were obscured by the ways in which advertising and entertainment put people off the track.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964

“Yes, the slang thing is of great interest to media students because every new medium brings a world of slang with it. Because slang is after all perception. Slang is a way of seeing and feeling the world in its more recent development.” Marshall to Eric McLuhan 1971

“Consciousness itself is an inclusive process not at all dependent on content. Consciousness does not postulate consciousness of anything in particular.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Understanding Media’ 1964

“If Gutenberg made everybody a reader, Xerox made everybody a publisher, and the consequences in both cases are immense and revolutionary, regardless of what is printed or copied.” Marshall McLuhan unpublished typescript January 6, 1977

“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values.” Marshall McLuhan ‘Understanding Media’ 1964

“Any new structure for codifying experience and of moving information has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives.” Marshall McLuhan ‘New Media and the New Education’ 1960