Marshall McLuhan
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.'Collection: Technology
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.Collection: Space
Affluence creates poverty.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Failure
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.Collection: Men
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.Collection: Space
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.Collection: Art
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Age
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.Collection: Art
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.Collection: Travel
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.Collection: Car
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.Collection: Independence
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.Collection: Future
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.Collection: Age
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: War
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Politics
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.Collection: Space
Money is just the poor man's credit card.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Technology
The medium is the message.Collection: Communication
It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.Collection: Technology
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.
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
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.
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.
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.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
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.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.
The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
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.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Art is anything you can get away with.
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.