Best 329 quotes of Marshall Mcluhan on MyQuotes

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.

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

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

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

Affluence creates poverty.

A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors.

All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live on the frontier, you have no identity. You're a nobody.

All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.

All media are extensions of some human faculty- psychic or physical.

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

All media work us over completely.

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 message. 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.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.

A moral point of view too often serves as a substitute for understanding in technological matters.

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.

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.

A nomadic society cannot experience enclosed space.

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

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.

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art, and skill of many people. 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.

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.

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

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

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.

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.

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.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.

As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art.

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.'

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.

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.

A successful book cannot afford to be more than ten percent new.

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

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

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

Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage.

Clear prose indicates the absence of thought.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space.

Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.