The
Medium
is the
Massage

Quotes by Marshall McLuhan & others

Quotes from the magazine

This is the Quotes From The Magazine category.

Quotes from the fourth edition of multimedia magazine Aspen (1967) designed by Quentin Fiore and edited by and devoted to sixties media visionary Marshall McLuhan. Voluminous documentation of “Aspen Magazine – The McLuhan Issue” its contents is available via ubu.com/aspen.

“Training will be more concerned with training the senses and perceptions than with stuffing brains.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 42

“We’re only beginning to realize what a tiny slice of human possibility we now educate.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Soon, all that will be required of us will be one hour’s work per year.”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“It begins to be evident that ‘touch’ is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and ‘keeping in touch’ or ‘getting in touch’ is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell. The ‘common sense’ was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and beings declare their being totally.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Studies show a high correlation between sensory and bodily development—now largely neglected—and intelligence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“WHAT’LL HAPPEN WHEN INTELLIGENCE IS RECOGNIZED AS A GLOBAL RESOURCE?”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“The machine and the motorcar released the horse and projected it into the plane of entertainment, so does automation with men. We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This would seem to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us…”

— John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (The Saturday Review)

“The mass media are turning the globe into a village and catapulting 20th century man back to the life of the tribe.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Take it easy, but take it.”

— John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

“Ad people imagine that if you can remember their ads they’ve made a hit. But that’s not so.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“AS LONG AS ONE HUMAN BEING IS HUNGRY, THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE IS HUNGRY.”

— Buckminster Fuller, quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“AS MCLUHAN SAYS, EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE.”

— John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)”

“With the electronic music instrument, any tone can be made available in any intensity and for any length of time. Note that the older symphony orchestra was, by comparison, a machine of separate instruments that gave the effect of organic unity. With the electronic instrument, one starts with organic unity as an immediate act of perfect synchronization. This makes the attempt to create the effect of organic unity quite pointless. Electronic music must seek other goals.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Such is also the harsh logic of industrial automation. The range of choice in design, stress, and goal… is very much greater than it ever could have been under mechanization… Panic about automation as threat of uniformity on a world scale is the projection into the future of mechanical standardization and specialism, which are now past.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“If I don’t smoke, someone else will…”

— Erik Satie quoted in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” by John Cage

“It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among our senses is what constitutes our sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things but the very life and encounter of things in the mind.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Fragmentation by means of visual stress occurs in that isolation of moment in time, or aspect in space, that is beyond the power of touch, or hearing, or smell, or movement. By imposing unvisualizable relationships that are the result of instant speed, electric technology dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other senses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“All media [—or technologies—] work us over completely. They are so pervasive [—permeating throughout—] 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].”

— Marshall McLuhan

Quotes from the magazine

This is the Quotes From The Magazine category.

“Training will be more concerned with training the senses and perceptions than with stuffing brains.”

“A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are.”

“Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”

“We’re only beginning to realize what a tiny slice of human possibility we now educate.”

“Soon, all that will be required of us will be one hour’s work per year.”

“The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and beings declare their being totally.”

“Studies show a high correlation between sensory and bodily development—now largely neglected—and intelligence.”

“WHAT’LL HAPPEN WHEN INTELLIGENCE IS RECOGNIZED AS A GLOBAL RESOURCE?”

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us…”

“The mass media are turning the globe into a village and catapulting 20th century man back to the life of the tribe.”

“Take it easy, but take it.”

“Ad people imagine that if you can remember their ads they’ve made a hit. But that’s not so.”

“AS LONG AS ONE HUMAN BEING IS HUNGRY, THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE IS HUNGRY.”

“AS MCLUHAN SAYS, EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE.”

“…Advertising is all good news.”

“Real news is bad news—bad news about somebody, or bad news for somebody.”

“Four P.M. throughout the world. Whether we like it or not…”

“When information is brushed against information… {the results are startling and effective.}”

“The perennial quest [—search—] for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.”

“SHE WAS INDIGNANT WHEN I SUGGESTED THE USE OF AN APHRODISIAC. WHY? NATURALLY SHE CONSIDERS TV A WASTE OF TIME.”

“If I don’t smoke, someone else will…”

“It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among our senses is what constitutes our sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things but the very life and encounter of things in the mind.”

“If an ad has become so environmental as to be unperceived, that’s when it’s really doing it’s work.”

“McLuhan was able to say ‘The medium is the message’ because he started from no concern with content.”

“Advertisements are all good; the news is all bad.”

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