Quotes By Marshall McLuhan

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.

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

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

Affluence creates poverty.

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.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

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.

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

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

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.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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

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.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

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

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