Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools ...

Money is a poor man's credit card.

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

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can alwa...

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

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which ...

To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into...

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experi...

Art is anything you can get away with.

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of t...

Art is whatever you can get away with.

The ear favours no particular “point of view.”We are enveloped by sound.It forms a seamless web arou...

The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "w...

All media work us over completely.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in t...

The wheel… is an extension of the foot. The book… is an extension of the eye…Clothing, an extension ...

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle a...

I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the on...

At every turn, while he was investigating the background for his study of Thomas Nashe, he would enc...

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight andunderstanding.

The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at t...

It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become an...

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happ...

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any me...

Money is the poor people's credit card.

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

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order...

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

In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the on...

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the...

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

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian but not a Canadian. We know how to live without...

By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you a...

The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this n...

The medium is the message.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools...

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell t...

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

The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise ...

if it works it's obsolete

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

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

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

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age ...

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatris...

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information,...

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

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer...

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

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding,...

Affluence creates poverty.

Only the vanquished remember history.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place w...

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

I don't necessarily agree with everything that I say.

First we build the tools, then they build us.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rat...

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by t...

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the...

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and mos...

Violence is the quest for identity. When identity disappears with technological innovation violence...

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate i...