A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Affluence creates poverty.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.'
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Money is just the poor man's credit card.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
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.
- Marshall McLuhan Quote
