Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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Marshall McLuhan

Profession : Sociologist

Birth : July 21, 1911

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

Marshall McLuhan

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

Marshall McLuhan

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Marshall McLuhan

In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.

Marshall McLuhan

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.

Marshall McLuhan

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Marshall McLuhan

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

Marshall McLuhan

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

Marshall McLuhan

The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty.

Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan

Jokes are grievances.

Marshall McLuhan

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.

Marshall McLuhan