Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Author Image

Marshall McLuhan

Profession : Sociologist

Birth : July 21, 1911

Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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.'

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Marshall McLuhan

Art is anything you can get away with.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan