Quotes By Marshall McLuhan

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

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

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

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

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.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.