Marshall McLuhan Quotes

The medium is the message.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment.

The medium is the massage.

Art is anything you can get away with.

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.

In the man of the future, the artist and the scientist will tend to be one.

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

The future of the book is the blurb.

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.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness.

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

The poet, the artist, the sleuth – whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely ‘well-adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends.

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

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

Marshall McLuhan Quotes part 2

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

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

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.’

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

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

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.

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

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

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to shift our gears and alter our states of mind is generally automated. The passive consumer of media has mind gears that are shifted for him almost without his volition.

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perception. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world.

To define is to exclude.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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

Management can be reduced to a few simple principles that explain its dynamics as well as its paradoxes. The first principle is that nobody can manage organizations. The second one is that organizations are not manageable.

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

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.

Money is a poor man’s credit card.

The classified research industry has been throwing quite a feast for the past 15 years or so.

It is safer to be a section of the crowd than it is to be an individual.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man’s technological clothing; it’s an extension of our central nervous system.

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

In this new electronic world, the sensory ratios are reversed.

An image is not a final product of ‘A’ but the A-Ware of a process resembling an electronic computer program. An individual may fuse into a third-dimensional network – that is, an image – with checks and balances invented for words.

The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.

Escape from doubt is a shortcut to faith.

Today, of course, the advertising power of the water fountain is diverted to Pepsi-Cola and other refreshments which people can take with them.

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

Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors.

The adman is a priest who specializes in linguistic reanimation.

It is this concept of association of ideas, which accounts for the curious relevance of advertisements. Nobody expects to find trains or cigarettes or cameras or rubber tires in the perfume or fashion advertisements [but] the relevance is consistent.

An innovation isn’t worth shit unless it can become a tradition.

The mystery of the alphabet is the mystery of the universe.

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.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

The highway hypnosis—20 miles or so without a conscious thought – is characteristic of our time.