Marshall McLuhan's Quotes

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Affluence creates poverty.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.