Marshall McLuhan

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.

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.

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

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

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

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

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

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Jokes are grievances.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

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.

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

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.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

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.

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

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

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

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

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

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.'

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

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