Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

Affluence creates poverty... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'.. view

By: Marshall McLuhan

Art is anything you can get away with... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the message... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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

By: Marshall McLuhan

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

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... view

By: Marshall McLuhan

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition... view

By: Marshall McLuhan