Quotes from the record

This is the Quotes From The Record category.

Quotes from the LP recording of “The Medium is the Massage” by Marshall McLuhan, released by Columbia Records in March 1967, conceived and co-ordinated by Jerome Agel, and produced by John Simon. Listen to Side A and Side B via ubu.com.

Side 1

“How do you like it so far?”

“Terrific!”

“This last week was like a total breakdown.”

— Franz Kafka, “Diaries”

“I wouldn’t be seen dead with a living work of art.”

— Museum Curator

“Nowadays a fact is what has been translated into words or images. [Those qualities cease form to combine fact and drag me upon the opinion of acquainted wit.]”

— Jacques Ellul, “The Political Illusion”

“Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“The word is out!”

“What does it all say? I’m not too often concerned about this. It’s just a phase.”

“The medium is the massage. {The medium is the massage.}”

— parrot

“Marshall McLuhan”, “Marshall McLuhan.”

— parrot

“Now, what then?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There’ll probably be some music, but we’ll manage to find a quiet corner where we can talk.”

— Erik Satie, quoted in “Silence: Lectures and Writings” by John Cage

“Uh, professor McLuhan”

“Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—[for looking ahead,] for probing around”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively apposed, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“1-2, 1-2-3-4”

“[The medium of our time,] electric circuitry, profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“A fact of interplay.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“There ain’t no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 238

“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

“The
Medium
Is the
Massage.”

— 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

“[John Cage, a composer of new music, has stated:] “Everything we do is music.””

— John Cage, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors”

“I wanna to ask you what’d you expect McLuhan would be doing once he’s there next year—or later this year. We have .. There’s a friend of mine at Fordham who’s on the faculty… and, eh, he’s writing a booklet called: ‘What to do until McLuhan comes’.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“Eh. We can, eh … have to make a distinction. I believe it. I truly believe it. For another photograph. … That’s incredible! … Because he’s a very unlikely hero in many ways.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“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, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog}.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“The wrath of Achilles is my theme. That fatal wrath {, which—in fulfilment of the will of Zeus—brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many noblemen to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds. Let us begin, goddess of song, with the angry parting that took place between Agamemnon King of Men and the great Achilles, son of Peleus. Which of the gods was it that made them quarrel?}”

— Homer, “Iliad”

“Environments [are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which] are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 8

“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories [; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves … You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing].”

— Socrates, quoted in “Phaedrus” by Plato, see also “Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press”, p. 2

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t the fish.”

— John Culkin, quoted by Howard Gossage in “Ramparts Magazine”, April 1966, p. 37

“I do believe it. I really believe it.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“The goose’s quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of CIVILIZATION began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“We shape our toes and thereafter our toes ape us.”

“Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise, Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? That we by tracing magic lines are taught, How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?”

— translation of Brébeuf’s verse translation of Lucan’s “Pharsalia” in “The Origin and Progress of Writing” by Thomas Astle

“Writing did not merely record language, it was a totally new medium of expression and communication which the spoken word came in turn to imitate.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Writing encouraged an analytical mode of thinking, with emphasis upon lineality, continuity and connectedness. In other words, visuality.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Once more, please.”

“I… the trouble is, I keep thinking of improvements on these passages all the time…”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Where is A, it precedes B, and B follows A, and precedes C.”

— Bertrand Russell, “The Prinicple of Individuation” in “Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits”

“Writing was an embalming process that froze language. It eliminated the art of ambiguity and made puns the lowest form of wit.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Should old Aquinas be forgot.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The “expert” is the man who stays put.”

— 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

“Writing destroyed word linkages.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The simultaneous interrelations between many levels of meaning of the word have to be sacrificed in keeping everything moving on a single plane on one level. The word became the static symbol, applicable to and separable from that which it symbolized. It now belonged to the objective world; it could be seen. It was a thing. Now came the distinction between being and meaning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“… Marshall himself says all he does is describing—prescribing.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“Baby, this thing is bigger than all of us.”

“Often we do not know what we think till a question is put to us.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“John, John who?”

“He also doesn’t make very many value judgements or suggestions about what people should do about these things.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“Show me something new; I’ll begin all over again.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“{Every new technology creates a new environment in which men live and work.} The technology of the alphabet and of moveable type—printing {—predisposed us to think and act in certain ways.}”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The alphabet and print technology [printing] extended the emphasis upon lineality. It fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. [A habit of thinking in bits and parts, and step by step.]”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Can I have the eh…”

“Printing completely changed everything. It changed what men thought of themselves, how they behaved towards each other, it changed systems of government. And so on and so on and so on.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“And so on and so on…”

“[You know, t]he most favourable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass.”

— Jacques Ellul, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”

“The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress [of applied knowledge]. It provided the first uniformly repeatable “commodity”, the first assembly-line [and the first] mass-production.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 124

“[Printing] created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire—and conspire.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“It was the print-oriented genius of the Western world that created and applied knowledge and technology unrivalled in human history and learned to manipulate matter, energy and human life by breaking down every useful process into its functional parts, then producing any required number of each part.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?”

— James Joyce, “Finnigans Wake”

“Just as pre-shaped parts became components of, say, an airplane, human specialists became components of a great SOCIAL machine.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Compartmentalization of occupations and interests bring about a seperation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive ‘doing’.”

— John Dewey, “Art as Experience”

“…who’s clocking 40,000 dollars a year coming up to Marshall with a copy of the book in the hand asking for an autograph with absolute the same degree of abandon and awe. I was really amazed…”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“[It’s a little bit like] the Balinese have a saying [/who say]: We have no art. We do everything as well as [possible/] we can.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 73

“As we move into the world of integral, computerized knowledge, mere classification becomes secondary and inadequate to the speeds with which data can now be processed. We are moving out of the world of data classification into the world of pattern recognition.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.”

— John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings”

“Why did the moron take a ladder to church?”

“Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachment, of non-involvement.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Then there’s a story which illustrates the kind of pun that is not customary in literary society. The story of the boy scout who helped a nun across the street.”

“…if you talk with Marshall, the conversations are brilliant, exciting and stimulating.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“David Ogilvy, the advertiser, tends to begin all of his memos with …”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“And the nun thanked the lad who replied: That’s all right Madame, any relative of Batman is a friend of mine!”

“The visual pattern of the sculptured costume, starched costume of the nun, bares a certain structural relation to Batmans costume. So that the strange bridge between the nun and Batman is a bit of pattern recognition or visual punning.”

“Visual punning as opposed to mere verbal punning, is something that is beginning to happen again in our electronic time… And, uh, it is one of the pet activities of Eskimos. They delight in spotting visual puns in the ordinary environment in various materials.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Such as… ?”

“Stone. They delight to see a configuration in stone that resembles a walrus tusk or eh …”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Do you like your job, Mr Mcluhan?”

“America was able to develop and apply swiftly all the consequences of printing. In the book, in the newspaper, and by extension of the assembly line in industry and organization and markets because there was no backlog of obsolete technology to be liquidated first. Europeans had to struggle through a long painful period in order to clear enough room to exploit the new print technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Quanto è bella la prospectiva.”

— Paolo Uccello

“Ok now, once more with more expression.”

“Now hold it. Eh, that’s part of the script!”

“Our Renaissance legacy was the vanishing point. The single static viewpoint of the limited optical science of the time. This single piercing view demanded a central point of interest and an undisturbed restful symmetry to either side of it.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This is the place to see it from fellows.”

“The eye—it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where’er they be, against or with our will.”

— William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply”

“Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose that these divisions inhere in the very constitution of human nature.”

— John Dewey, “Art as Experience”

“The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 48

“I’ve never been here before.”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“Now for the evidence,” said the King, “and then the sentence”. “No!” said the Queen, “first the sentence, and then the evidence!” “Nonsense!” cried Alice, so loudly that everybody jumped, “the idea of having the sentence first!”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms—particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The line, the [/that good old reliable] continuum

—this sentence is a prime example—

became the organizing principle of life.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“When advanced systems of those so called typesetting really get going then I think that it would be very simple to – and inexpensive and quite reasonable – to simply record conversation.”

“We have been literary saying: I don’t follow you.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“… chopping and cropping of words. The first time …”

“The new principle: how does that grab ya, is a more involved, multi-sensualist approach to the problem of meaning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“As we begin, so shall we go.”

“Rationality” and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts. For many people rationality still has the connotation of uniformity and connectiveness. “I don’t follow you” means “I don’t think what you’re saying is rational.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“How does that grab ya?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I still don’t follow you.”

“Indeed, even our tests for sanity often assumed that the line is present in nature and, at most, must to be discovered or given visual existence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Typography cracked the voices of silence.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 250

“Take it easy, but take it.”

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

“…what has been worked over to give it a general character very very few people can experience directly.”

— Jacques Ellul, “The Political Illusion”

“We are proud of our museums where we display a way of living that we have made impossible.”

— A.K. Coomaraswamy, quoted in “Explorations” #8

“The railway radically altered the personal outlooks and patterns of social interdependence. It bred and nurtured the American Dream.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[The railroad] created totally new urban, social, and family worlds. New ways of work. New ways of management. New legislation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Conk a dook he’ll do.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“{As [the] new [electric] technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression.} Teamwork succeeds private effort.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Oᴜʀꜱ is the first age in which many thousands of the best trained minds have made it a full time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man”, p. v

“The art of the speaker consists in compressing all of his aims into slogans.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

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

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

“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

Side 2

“It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”

— A.N. Whitehead, “Science and the Modern World”

“Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in molding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence.
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness.
Thus we are helped by what is not,
To use what is.”

— Laotze, “Tao Te Ching”

“{Electric circuitry is orientalizing the West.} The contained, the distinct, the separate—our Western legacy—are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are being taken on an inner trip, into our own inner beings, which involve us, in depth, in things that had formerly been merely superficial, visual, external, and detached from our own beings.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The West shall shake the East awake… while ye have the night for the morn…”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“All
media
are
extensions
of
some
human
faculty—
psychic [/mental]
or
physical.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The wheel …is an extension of the foot.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 46

“{The book} is an extension of the eye…”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 368

“Clothing, [is] an extension of the skin…”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 129

“Electric circuitry, [the medium of our time, is] an extension of the central nervous system.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 3

“[Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions.] The extension of any one sense [displaces the other senses and] alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. [The way we perceive our own bodies.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 69

“When
these
ratios
change,
men change.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 9 and “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 98

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

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

“Come and get it!”

“The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear—hearing was believing. The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Man was given an eye for an ear.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 26

“Right.”

“They [I Ching] told me to continue what I was doing, and to spread JOY and revolution.”

— John Cage, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors”

“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

“{The method of our time is to use not single but multiple models for [experimental] exploration—the technique of the suspended judgment} [is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 71

“[George Washington once remarked,] “We haven’t heard from Benjamin Franklin in Paris this year. We should write him a letter.””

— George Washington

“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Just you and me George.”

“Electric circuitry has rudely thrust us into a world that is quite unusual and quite unlike any previous world and for which no previous model of perception will serve.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 40

“The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Well, if you take a sentence like “The medium is the message”, which is, you know, misunderstood. People who don’t read McLuhan or got comments on McLuhan they say Oh, well, of course, content is part of the message too. And they think they have said something. They haven’t understood what it really means.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“The medium is the mess age.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The medium is the mass age, great!”

“From his cool office in Toronto he has taken a whole generation by the scruff of the neck and said look at this problem whether I irritate you into it or seduce you into it. He’s just made a certain kind of awareness.”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“We want freedom.”

“I like that hair!” “Hihihi”

“The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early mistakes.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“No erasure of any sense.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“”Time” [in a sense] has ceased, “space” has vanished. [Like primitives,] we now live in a global village [of our own making]—a simultaneous happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are back in acoustic space. {We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.}”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Counterblast” (1954)

“The tribalizing process, the inner trip, the depth involvement in the experience of the unified human family, that is something of which we’ve had no experience for many centuries. It is a process that is located so entirely in the present that it does not appear at all in the rear-view mirror to which we habitually look to for reassurance and nostalgic orientation.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Joyce called it all space in a naught shell, a naught shell being an eternal present.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“All rights reserved. Copyright 1967. The I Shall Find It Publishing Company.”

“God, I’m so hungry.”

“In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We shall overcome!”

“The magic of strangers who live far off is greatly dreaded.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive “outside” world created by new informational media.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 22

“Youth instinctively understands the present environment—the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology—mechanization.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The major advances of civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”

— A.N. Whitehead, “Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect”

“10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0”

“The flight director says: get back in.” “Back in?” “Back in!” “Roger.” “We’ve been trying to talk to you…”

— Christopher C. Kraft, Jr.

“Who are you, are you good enough to eat?”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Some of them looked pretty good in them.”

“We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“This is McLuhan number 3, take 2.” “Take 3.” “2 this is.” “No.” “Number 2?” “Alright number 2. Because the other was number 2.” “Alright number 2, take 3.”

“How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change?”

— Marshall McLuhan

“You never knew what was coming next.”

“With Kiss. Kiss Criss. Cross Criss. Kiss Cross.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“Let hear us some electric circuitry”. “Very good idea”. “Wait for us.”

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“The total environment is now the great teacher.”

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

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

— Marshall McLuhan

“There is a world of difference between the modern home environment of integrated electric information and the classroom.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Britain formally applies for membership in the [European Common] market.”

— newspaper

“Westmoreland gets control of pacification program in Vietnam.”

— newspaper

“Breakfast is on the table!”

“Alright, I had an impression, a hunch …”

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

— 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

“When my act first caught on, I had offered every major publishing house to do a book on anything at all. That’s not writing. That’s exploiting!”

— Woody Allen

“The real breakthrough here people, the fact people don’t understand. The number of people who say you use words because he’s explaining television that he’s somehow against use words. We have to.. people will think… tho see for themselves. We really need footnotes derived from the visual arts, from graphic art, from sound, from music…”

“The artist, the enema of society, points out things that many people would prefer not to notice.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“[Today] Art
is anything
you can
get away
with.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The envelope please.”

“Next is my page 19. Speech 1. Innumerable confusion.”

“I don’t think you can quite get quite get away with that phrase. Ahum, innumerable, so it suggests numbers. Instead the confusion is singular. I don’t know. Do you like the phrase ‘Innumerable confusion?’” “Well, it’s part of it.” “It’s part of what?” “It’s part of the confusion, sir.” “Ah-ha. Okay, you remind me.”

“Innumerable confusion and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions, such as our own. Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools—with yesterday’s concepts. [With yesterday’s ideals.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 274

“And now a word from our sponsor…”

“Speak that I may see you.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Counterblast” (1954)

“I’m leaving.…”

”…as much as I love you. And I must…”

“The young person today is a data processor on a very large scale.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“And the end and the beginning were always there. Before the beginning and after the end.”

— T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (V 10-11)

“I’m starving.”

“Sheep, who die silently, are no use as victims.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“Nose-counting, a cherished part of the eighteenth-century fragmentation process, has rapidly become a cumbersome and ineffectual form of social assessment in an environment of instant electric speeds. The public, in the sense of a great consensus of separate and distinct viewpoints, is finished.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents towards the foam below.”

— Edgar Allen Poe, “A Descent into the Maelstrom” as quoted in “The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man”, p. v

“Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psychological responses.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The new electric drama has left us d-a-n-g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us—they refer us only to the past, not to the present.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“…a mother, a father, two children and an anthropologist.”

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

“What’s the definition of an Eskimo family?”

“Now all the world’s a sage.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We are back once more in the age of the hunter. This time the hunter is a fact finder and a researcher and a discoverer.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I discovered… a kind of massage. What you need. And what you do with them, is take the cover off, take the binding off, and then put the book together, sequentially, but not necessarily in just one straight line, across the wall. And the look of that is something completely different then other again. And some of the images just jump off the wall, I noticed. That famous foot that you…, brilliant! And then if you hang it up…”

— discussion in the serie ‘Word Count’ on WBAI-FM with John Culkin and Quentin Fiore. Moderator: Samuel Blazer.

“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

— A. N. Whitehead, “Adventures in Ideas”

“The meaning of meaning … is meaning.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“The young today reject goals. They want roles [—R-O-L-E-S. That is, total involvement. They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Today’s child is growing up absurd, because it lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 4

“I know, I know.”

“Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Silence is the unintended sounds of our environment.”

— John Cage, derived from Calvin Tomkins in “The Bride and the Bachelors” and referred to in “Address at Vision 65” , p. 7

“He has proved himself, for he is alive.”

— Elias Canetti, “The Survivor”

“No comment.”

“[Robert Oppenheimer was fond of saying:] There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted by Marshall McLuhan in “Address at Vision 65”, p. 12

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

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

“The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.”

— Marshall McLuhan, “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p. 31

“Lucky cocks for whom the audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“At alls will?”

“The new modes of instantaneous, long-distance human communication—radio, telephone, television—are linking the world’s people in a vast net of electric circuitry that creates a new depth and breadth of personal involvement in events and breaks down the old, traditional boundaries that made specialization possible.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“As the audience becomes a participant in the total electric drama, the classroom can become a scene in which the audience performs an enormous amount of work.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 12

“All dictators inflating bureaucracy do it with the cry: “Down with bureaucracy!””

— Jacques Ellul, “The Political Illusion”

“Personal freedom consists largely in having a defence against questions.”

— Elias Canetti, “Crowds and Power”

“Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I have a friend. Every time he sees an empty telephone booth he ducks in to make a call.”

“Even science fiction is now very far behind what is actually happening.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“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

“Without an understanding of the media around us we cannot … achieve a temporarily awareness of the world in which we live. Our very concepts of media-analysis are limited. Limited to quantum analysis, and unrelated to the new configurations of electronic media. Our sensory levels have already changed aggressively since television.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man”, p. 8

“The visual component in our lives has dropped tremendously. The visceral, the kinetic, and auditory modes of response have risen to compensate. This sensory shift has forced us to re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.”

— Marshall McLuhan, see “Address at Vision 65” , p. 10

“You mean, life isn’t a fountain?”

“Education must shift from instruction, from the imposing of stencils on brain pens, as it were, to discovery—to probing and exploration [and to the recognition of the language of forms].”

— Marshall McLuhan

“We have now to accept the fact and responsibility that the entire human environment is an artifact. An art form. [Something that can be staged, manipulated, like showbiz.]”

— Marshall McLuhan, see also “Address at Vision 65” , p. 6

“Jobs represent a relatively recent pattern of work organization. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute mechanization and specialism. These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“Unhappily, many well-intentioned political reform programs that aim at the alleviation of suffering caused by unemployment betray an ignorance of the true nature of media-influence.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“I done me best when I was let.”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as cheap to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination!”

— Marshall McLuhan

“… technology in the world. It’s educational and industrial establishments build by print and methods derived from print are vast and pervasive.”

— Marshall McLuhan

““Backward countries” now have a huge advantage over us. We now stand in relation to electronic technology much as we once stood in relation to print technology.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“What we plan to do, or can do, to brainwash ourselves of this obsolete inheritance has yet to be faced.”

— Marshall McLuhan

“As design and communications mold the environment, so they shape human perceptions, which—processed at speeds consistent with the electronic information movement—induce changes in human institutions at a rate that for the first time in human history makes change the subject.”

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

““{And} who are you?” [said the Caterpillar.]”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“I–I hardly know, sir, just at present–at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

“Where the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable…”

— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”

“We’re getting unclustered, eh…”

“Okay, professor McLuhan, let’s take it from the top.”

“Hooray!”