Quotes By Marshall McLuhan

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

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

Art is anything you can get away with.

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

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.

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.

Jokes are grievances.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Affluence creates poverty.

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

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 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.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The medium is the message.

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.

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

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