Marshall McLuhan Quotes
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
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.'
Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.
The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.
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.
We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.
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.
the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.
The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.
Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.
Man works when he is partially involved. When he is totally involved he is at play or leisure.
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.
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.
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudosimplicities of brutal directness.
The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
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.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.
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 poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends.
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.
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.
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.
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.
What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.
