“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.”
Technology
“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.”
TechnologyAll Quotes by Marshall McLuhan
“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.”
Age“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.”
Society“Art is anything you can get away with.”
Art“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.”
Business“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“In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”
Age“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.”
Society“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.”
Age“Money is a poor man's credit card.”
Money“Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.”
Art“The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.”
Travel“It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.”
Technology“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.”
Education“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.”
Age“Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.”
Art“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
Nature“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.”
Alone“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”
Experience“Money is just the poor man's credit card.”
Money