Quotes By Marshall McLuhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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

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.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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.

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.'

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

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.

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.