Marshall McLuhan quotes:

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

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

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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.

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

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Art is anything you can get away with.

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

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.

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

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

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy."

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

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.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Affluence creates poverty.

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

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds

The alphabet was one thing when applied to clay or stone, and quite another when set down on light papyrus.

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

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

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.

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

The laws of the media, in tetrad form, bring logos and formal cause up to date to reveal analytically the structure of all human artefacts.

What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

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

Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the "Tower of Babel" by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

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.

Canadians are the people who learned to live without the bold accents of the natural ego-trippers of other lands.

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

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.

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 wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

Since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience.

The electric age ... established a global network that has much the character of our central nervous system.

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

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.

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.

Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

The village had institutionalized all human functions in forms of low intensity.... Participation was high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

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

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened.

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

Education is civil defence against media fallout.

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.

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.

Jokes are grievances.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.

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

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.

Television is teaching all the time. Does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning.

The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.

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

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.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

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

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

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

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.

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

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature.

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

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 massage. 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.

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

The medium is the message.

In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.

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

New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature.

The student of media soon comes to expect the New Media of any period whatever to be classed as 'pseudo' by those who acquired the patterns of earlier media, whatever they may happen to be.

If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

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.

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

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.

Phenomenology is dialectic in ear-mode - a massive and decentralized quest for roots, for ground.

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

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.

Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.

Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling.