Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Marshall McLuhan

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan.

Last updated on September 18, 2024.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Canadian - Sociologist | July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980

Source: Wikipedia

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Affluence creates poverty.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Marshall McLuhan

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

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

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

Marshall McLuhan

Art is anything you can get away with.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan