Quotes By Marshall McLuhan

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.

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.'

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

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

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.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

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

Art is anything you can get away with.

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

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.

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.

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

Jokes are grievances.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Affluence creates poverty.

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

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

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

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.