Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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Marshall McLuhan

Profession : Sociologist

Birth : July 21, 1911

We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

Marshall McLuhan

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 much more powerful than he could ever be.

Marshall McLuhan

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Marshall McLuhan

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Marshall McLuhan

Money is a poor man's credit card.

Marshall McLuhan

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Marshall McLuhan

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan