Quotations
"Concepts are provisional affairs for apprehending reality"
(McLuhan, 1951, p. vi)
"The new media are not bridges between man and nature:
they are nature" (McLuhan, 1969, p. 14)
"The medium is the message" (McLuhan,
1964, Ch. 1)
"The medium is the massage" (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967)
"The medium is the mess age" (McLuhan,
1969, p. 23)
"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive
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. Any understanding of
social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way
media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty
- psychic or physical." (McLuhan and Fiore,
1967, p. 26)
"Horses are fine. So are books" (Carpenter
and McLuhan, 1960a, p. 182)
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter
our tools shape us" (McLuhan, 1964, p. ?,
after Alexander Pope and William Blake)
"I can only show you the door." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling
experts. Now all the world's a sage." (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 14)
"'Come into my parlor', said the computer to the specialist."
(McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p. 20)
"First the sentence, and then the evidence." (Carroll,
1954, quoted in McLuhan and Fiore, 1967,
pp. 42-43)
"I don't explain - I explore" (McLuhan in Stearn,
1967, p. xiii)
"A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza."
(McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p. 53)
"Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. 'Time' has
ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous
happening." (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p.
63)
"Print technology created the public. Electric technology
created the mass." (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967,
p. 68)
"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new
situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor
of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land."
(McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, pp. 74-75)
"Environments are invisible." (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 84)
"'Speak that I may see you.'" (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 118)
"The 'expert' is the man who stays put." (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 93)
"Education must shift from instruction to discovery."
(McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p. 100)
"The ear favours no particular 'point of view'. We are
enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us." (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 111)
"There was no ear illiteracy in pre-literate Greece."
(McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p. 113)
"It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes
without a knowledge of the working of media." (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 8)
"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there
is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 25)
"It is perhaps not generally realized that a refrigerator
can be a revolutionary symbol - to a people who have no refrigerators."
(McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p. 131)
"Real, total war has become information war. It is being
fought by subtle electric informational media - under cold conditions, and
constantly." (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p.
138)
"The hydrogen bomb is history's exclamation point. It
ends an age-long sentence of manifest violence." (McLuhan
and Fiore, 1967, p. 138)
"The environment as a processor of information is propaganda.
Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. You must talk to the media, not the
programmer." (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p.
142)
"Humour is the essential ingredient of a democratic society."
(Slogan from The Prisoner TV series, 1967)
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous." (A.
N. Whitehead, quoted in McLuhan and Fiore, 1967,
p. 160)
"We impose the form of the old on the content of the new."
(McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p. 86)
"The 'content' of any medium is always another medium."
(McLuhan, 1964, Part 1, Chapter 1)
"Casting my perils before swains." (McLuhan in Stearn,
1967, p. xiii)
"As you can see, we've had our eye on your for some
time now, Mr Anderson. It seems that you've been living two lives." (Agent
Smith in The Matrix)
"Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
You are a plague. And we are...the cure." (Agent Smith in The
Matrix)
"I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like
Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"Welcome to the real world." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"What is real? How do you define real?" (Morpheus
in The Matrix)
"Welcome to 'the desert of the real'." (Morpheus,
quoting Baudrillard, in The Matrix)
"Throughout human history, we have been dependent
on machines to survive." (Morpheus in The Matrix)
"Wake up Neo." (Trinity in The
Matrix)
"Follow the white rabbit." (Trinity in The
Matrix)
"It's the question that drives us. It's the question
that brought you here." (Trinity in The Matrix)
"What is the Matrix?" (Neo in The
Matrix)
"After nine years, do you know what I've realised?
Ignorance is bliss." (Cypher in The Matrix)
"I think we can handle one little girl." (Police
Lieutenant in The Matrix)
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure
if you're awake or still dreaming?" (Neo in The
Matrix)
"Never send a human to do a machine's job." (Agent
in The Matrix)
"This is insane! I can't do this!" (Neo in The
Matrix)
"I brought you here to warn you." (Trinity in The
Matrix)
"The time has come to make a choice." (Rhineheart
- Thomas Anderson's boss - in The Matrix)
"You've felt it your whole life, felt that something
is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but its there like a splinter
in your mind, driving you mad." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"The Matrix is everywhere, all around us." (Morpheus
in The Matrix)
"There is no spoon." ('Spoon boy' in The
Matrix)
"Why do my eyes hurt?" (Neo in The
Matrix)
"You wanted to know what the matrix is." (Morpheus
in The Matrix)
"This will feel a little weird." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"What is real? How do you define what is real?" (Morpheus
in The Matrix)
"What is the matrix? Control." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"I can't go back, can I?" (Neo in The
Matrix)
"Free your mind." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"Your mind makes it real." (Morpheus in The
Matrix)
"Ignorance is bliss." (Cypher in The
Matrix)
"I want to be rich. Someone important. Like an actor."
(Cypher in The Matrix)
"Try not to think of it in terms of right and wrong."
(Morpheus in The Matrix)
"Have you ever stood and stared at it, Morpheus?
Marveled at its beauty. Its genius. Billions of people living out their
lives...oblivious." (Agent Smith in The Matrix)
"Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology
(or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in
turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as
it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant
world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine
world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely,
in providing him with wealth." (McLuhan, 1964,
Chapter 4)
"I love the view." (Max Renn in Videodrome)
"It has a philosophy, and that is what makes it dangerous."
(Masha in Videodrome)
"I've got something I want to play for you." (Barry
Convex in Videodrome)
"I am the video word made flesh." (Max Renn in Videodrome)
"Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh." (Max
Renn in Videodrome)
"Love comes in at the eye." (Lorenzo de Medici, quoted
by Barry Convex in Videodrome)
"The eye is the window of the soul." (Lorenzo de
Medici, quoted by Barry Convex in Videodrome)