Marshall McLuhan Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Art is anything you can get away with.

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

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

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

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

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

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

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

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

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

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.

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.

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

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.'

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

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

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

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.

ONLY THE SMALL SECRETS NEED TO BE PROTECTED.THE BIG ONES ARE KEPT SECRET BY PUBLIC INCREDULITY.

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.

We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.

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

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.

Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

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

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.

The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's problems.

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

The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends,

Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.

The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton.

It has always been the artist who realizes that the future is the present and uses his work to prepare the grounds for it

Youth instinctively understand the present environment - the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

The greatest propaganda in the world is our mother tongue, that is what we learn as children, and which we learn unconsciously. That shapes our perceptions for life. That is propaganda at its most extreme form.

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.