Quotes by
Marshall McLuhan

It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.

The camera tends to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

Nobody can commit photography alone.

...the logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph.

The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes.

To say that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an ‘allnights newsery reel’, that substitutes a ‘reel’ world for reality. Joyce knew more about the effect of the photograph on our senses, our language, and our thoughts process than anybody else.

To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

...people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices. The photo and visual worlds are secure areas of anaesthesia.