We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Marshall McLuhan Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
Money is a poor man’s credit card.
Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
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.
Affluence creates poverty.
Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.
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 become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
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.
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.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
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.
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.
Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.
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.
Art is anything you can get away with.
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.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist.
The medium is the message.
Money is just the poor man’s credit card.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
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.
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
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.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.
For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
