Quotes By Marshall McLuhan

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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

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.

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

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

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.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.