Words matter. These are the best Marshall McLuhan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
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.
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.
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.’
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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.
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
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.
If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.
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.
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Money is a poor man’s credit card.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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.
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.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
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.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
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.
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.
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.
Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person’s car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
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.
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
Money is just the poor man’s credit card.
