Top 383 Quotes & Sayings by Marshall McLuhan - Page 2

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

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.

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

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

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

Jokes are grievances.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

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.

Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

The future of work consists of learning a living.

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 so much more powerful than he could ever be.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

As a rule, I always look for what others ignore.

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.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

The computer is the most extraordinary of man's technological clothing; it's an extension of our central nervous system. Beside it, the wheel is a mere hula-hoop.

The age of automation is going to be the age of "do it yourself".

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

Education is civil defence against media fallout.

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.

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher.

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

The literate man is a sucker for propaganda...You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas.

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

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

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

What goes on inside the school is an interruption of education.

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

Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's problems.

What is very little understood about the electronic age is that it angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software.

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

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

Invention is the mother of necessities.

All advertising advertises advertising.

Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right, those which most often succeed.

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening

The most human thing about us is our technology.

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

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

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

First we build the tools, then they build us.

The mother tongue is propaganda.

It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.

I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt.

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 message. 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.

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

Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.

Fish did not discover water.