Quotes By Marshall McLuhan

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

Affluence creates poverty.

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

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.

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.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

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.

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.