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
Topics: Television
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
Topics: Information
Good taste is the first refuge of the non creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Taste, Style
Affluence creates poverty.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Poverty
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Sincerity, Candor
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Work
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Youth, Voting, Elections
Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Harmony, Aspirations, Advertising
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Information
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
Topics: Business
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Earth
The machine called Nature into an art form. For the first time at men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Wilderness
It is the weak and confused who worship the pseudo-simplicities of brutal directness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Friendship, Candor
The real news is bad news.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Journalists, Journalism, Media
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Experience
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Babies, Family
Jokes are grievances.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Jokes, Humor
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Eloquence, Conversation
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
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
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
Topics: Shopping
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.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology, Science
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.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Assumptions
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Driving
Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Technology, Anxiety
Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media, Advertising
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
Topics: Enjoyment, Diet, Appetite
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Media
Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Space
The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf.
—Marshall Mcluhan
Topics: Advertising
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
- Hans-Georg Gadamer German Philosopher
- Jose Ortega y. Gasset Spanish Philosopher
- Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
- John Rawls American Philosopher
- Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach German Philosopher
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel German Man of Letters
- Emanuel Swedenborg Swedish Mystic, Theologian, Scientist
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz German Philosopher, Mathematician
- Karl Marx German Philosopher, Economist
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