Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Art is anything you can get away with.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

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

We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.

Money is a poor man's credit card.

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

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.

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action.

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

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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