Marshall McLuhan famous quotes

Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Men #Play #Leisure

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Military #War #Division

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Motivational #Nature #Past

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Media #Psychics #Political

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Marketing #Environmental #World

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Wisdom #Art #Discovery

Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Environment #Process

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Men #Land #Doe

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Agreement #Cynicism #Favourite

The mother tongue is propaganda.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Mother #Tongue #Propaganda

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

#Media #Perception #Arbitrary

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Change #Growth #Belief

Our technology forces us to live mythically
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Technology #Force

The new is always made up of the old, or rather, what people see in the new is always the old thing. The rear-view mirror. The future of the future is the present, and this is something that people are terrified of.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Views #Old Things #Mirrors

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Science #Technology #Car

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

#Technology #Media #Framework

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

#Powerful #Yield #Demand

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Art #Business #Caves

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Tools #Shapes

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Communication #Men #Talking

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Art #Warning #Culture

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Art #Business #Journey

When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Unique #Two #Discovery

There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Errors

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Business #Goal #Advertising

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Future #Mirrors #Human Nature

All advertising advertises advertising.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Advertising

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

#Reality #Voting #Age

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Military #War #America

If it works, it's obsolete.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Hard Work #Obsolete #Working It

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Humorous #Men #Blow

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Meaningful #Spiritual #Identity

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Writing #Magazines #Care

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Mean #Artist #Bridges

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Birthday #Moving #Technology

All words, in every language, are metaphors.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Language #Metaphor

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Change #Views #Mirrors

First we build the tools, then they build us.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Tools #Firsts

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
-- Marshall McLuhan

#People #Sanity #Institutions

The future of work consists of learning a living.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Inspirational

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Peace #Ubuntu #Long

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Business #Science #Discovery

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Technology #Impact #Messages

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Knowledge #Age #Demand

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Environment #Boundaries

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Suicidal #Technology #Men

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

#Men #Car #Shells

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Business #Hands #Tyrants

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#May #Literacy #Schizophrenia

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

#Time #Men #Space

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Art #Men #Fields

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Success #Powerful #Political

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Technology #Media #Messages

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.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Art #Real #Mean

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.'
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Technology #Media #Age

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Mom #Baby #Thinking

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
-- Marshall McLuhan

#Life #Attitude #Views

When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.
-- Marshall McLuhan