Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

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

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.

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.'

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

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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.

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.

People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

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

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.

the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions

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.

In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.

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

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.

Don't ask whether it is right or wrong. Instead try to find out what is going on.

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

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

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

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.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

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.

The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We go forward looking in the rearview mirror.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

The news automatically becomes the real world for the TV user and is not a substitute for reality, but is itself an immediate reality.

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 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.

The future of work consists of learning a living.

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.