Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Our technology has already outstripped our ability to control it.

In the end the question is: Who is to be master, man or his machines? As long as the control over technology rests primarily on economic calculation, the victor is not likely to be man.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but I think it's violently misused.

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?

It's not that we use technology, we live technology.

We humans have a love-hate relationship with our technology. We love each new advance and we hate how fast our world is changing... The robots really embody that love-hate relationship we have with technology.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish.

if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands. We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex. ... This means we must subject the machine -- technology -- to control…

... as the world rapidly becomes a civilization of machines, the masters of machines will increasingly be the ones in control of the world.

Machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men.

We are not the technology. It should be our - you know, our slave, the technology. But it's rapidly becoming our master in many areas, I think.

As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.

Deskilling devices - they make us dumber. We're immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function, and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.

Technology is impacting everything we do on a daily basis.

The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.

We are estranged from our own deeper physiology because we are no longer in contact with nature. Instead, we are controlling nature with air pollution, heating, technology. But you have to know you have a depth within yourself which needs to be stimulated. If it doesn't get stimulated it becomes weaker, like a muscle that's not being used any more.

Our faith in technology is no longer fully consistent with our belief in liberty.

Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology.

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.