“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
“The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.”
– 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 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
“It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.”
– 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“Money is just the poor man’s credit card.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“Money is a poor man’s credit card.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.”
– 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
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”
– 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
“The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”
– 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 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.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“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.”
– 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
“Art is anything you can get away with.”
– 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
“Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.”
– Marshall McLuhan
“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”
– 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
“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