Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

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

"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"The medium is the message."

"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."

"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."

"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."

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

"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."

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

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

"Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Money is just the poor man's credit card."

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

"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."

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

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."

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