Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

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.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

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

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

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

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

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

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

Money is a poor man's credit card.

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 successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

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.

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

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

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

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

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Most people are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time.

One matter Englishmen don't think in the least funny is their happy consciousness of possessing a deep sense of humor.

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.

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian, but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity, and this is one of our marvellous resources.